attention economy

How many friends do you have? How many followers? How many people have liked your recent post or video? How many shares or how many re-tweets did that post have? And then ultimately what is the total score? How influential are you?

These are questions that might not be openly asked but are always on social media users’ minds. Constantly looking after their “scores” and checking on the popularity of others’, users today clearly show that in the social networking world numbers matter. Numbers reveal how sociable users are, how popular their sayings are, how interesting their everyday life appears to be. High scores depend on the content, or rather the virtuosity of the user behind the content; on the way moments, actions and thoughts are captured, expressed and uploaded, in proper timing with a readiness for timely interaction.

In the era of the attention economy, the social media world looks more and more like a game-space prompting players for their next decisions and moves. Following scores, newsfeed boards and status announcements, users compete for their online presence and peer recognition. Daily mediated interaction is charged by a degree of performativity, a degree of repetitiveness and addiction; a need to keep coming back to provide new feedback. But what drives these new modes of interaction? What is the broader context they can be studied in? Which are the forms of power and counter-power being developed?

When we are talking about the new media art and e-literature we need to emphasize a crucial shift in
a very nature of today’s work of art; instead of a stable work of art (Ger. Kunstwerk) we are witnessing its transformation to the flexible service of art, to the performance and the event. As such it enters the present society shaped by the shifts from industrial society to postindustrial (and information) one, from material labor to immaterial, from Taylorist mode of production to postindustrial, e. g. a flexible one, from material artifact to its logo, from manufacturing to marketing of brands, from the economy of artifacts to the economy of financial markets and their products.

The flight of capital away from the productive economy (of material goods) into the financial
economy of more abstract instruments and services has caused many significant consequences also in the scope of production and its very phenomenology. Suddenly, by the stock exchange driven financial markets with the novel series of risky financial products (derivates) are becoming the crucial venues of spectacular events in the present society. The question needs to be raised, what are the novel concepts taken from the field of economy that might be applied in the (social) theory of e-literature?In this paper we aim first to explore the shift from industrial production to postindustrial prosumption in terms that the feedback from e-literary world (of readers, scholars, critics) is getting
more and more crucial for the producers of e-literary works. E-literature authors write and program
their pieces for e-literary world, which is not an abstract entity but as a living one consisted from
readers, (other) artists and experts who are able to steady contribute some basic information to the
authors.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)