Abstract
Recently, the market form of scientific communication was adopted by the media industry. Media such as books, press, cinema, TV and the internet are information markets that can be divided into old media and new media according to market form. Old media are those markets where information continues to be exchanged for money; new media are those having left the sale of information behind to only focus on the attraction of attention. New media finance themselves by selling the service of attraction to the advertising industry. The market form of scientific communication thus finds itself translated from a highly differentiated producers’ market into an information market for mass consumption. This adaptation proves stunningly successful. New media outperform old media wherever they meet in competition. The business model of supplying information for the payment of attention instead of money lies at the foundations of many of the most successful firms on the planet. Advertisement-financed media have turned the economy of attention into the most successful business model of the 21st century.
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- 1.
For an authoritative overview see Robert van Krieken’s recent (2019) standard work.
- 2.
There are precursors, however, dating back to as early as 1835. See Wu (2016, Chap. 1).
- 3.
See Franck (1989) for an early account.
- 4.
The accent is on media since celebrity as such––the person’s glitter of publicity––is no new phenomenon. It is an offspring rather of the differentiation of the private and public sphere characteristic of modern societies. Robert van Krieken , in his comprehensive sociological account of the phenomenon (van Krieken 2019), traces it back to the courtly world where the reflection of royal attention was worked into the ultimate form of decoration. The shine could be passed, i.e. further reflected, to those surrounding the receiver who, in turn, could it pass it to her or his own surroundings. The hierarchy thus emerging took an initial step towards the emancipation of celebrity from merit. It foreshadowed celebrity society in its preoccupation with gossip as a way of socializing, accompanied by a creeping replacement of conquerors, military heroes, statesmen and religious leaders as cultural totems with celebrities of whatever kind.
- 5.
And had surpassed 27,000 by mid-2019.
- 6.
The figures are from Stockman 2013.
References
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Samuelson, Paul A. 1954, November. The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure. The Review of Economics and Statistics 36(4): 387–389.
Stockman, David. 2013. The Great Deformation, Public Affairs Symposium on ‘Conversation with Zombies’. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (4): 312–372.
Wu, Tim. 2016. The Attention Merchants. The Epic Scramble to Get Inside our Heads. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
van Krieken, Robert. 2019. Celebrity Society. The Struggle for Attention. 2nd ed., New York: Routledge
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Franck, G. (2020). IV The Economy of Attention in the Age of Neoliberalism. In: Vanity Fairs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41532-7_5
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