Werber: Attention Economy. Die Verteilung von Beachtung

Abstract: The concept of the attention economy has enjoyed a remarkable career since Georg Franck (1989), Michael Goldhaber (1997), and Thomas Davenport and John Beck (2000, 2001) first advanced the thesis that, in the age of the internet, money was being supplanted by a new currency governed by different rules. In recent decades, the term has been widely invoked to explain a broad range of social phenomena—from the rise of right-wing populism to increasing societal polarization—by appealing to an alleged natural law that determines how attention circulates in digital and social media. Yet the notion of an attention economy has rarely been subjected to sustained critical or methodological scrutiny. This paper seeks to reconstruct and interrogate the theoretical foundations of the attention-economy paradigm and to propose an alternative approach to conceptualizing the social problem of the unequal distribution of attention.