The economy of attention in the age of mental capitalism

Abstract

The paper explores the contemporary implementation of attention as a scarce resource, which the economy, politics, and media culture must manage, distribute, and speculate. The purpose is to analyse the commodification of human capacities of attention within the paradigm of media philosophy. Conceptualisations such as “mental capitalism,” competition for “eyes,” and “clickthroughs” were identified as particular instantiations of forms in social media, photography, and art — from Instagram and Facebook to graffiti. I promote the view that visuality is an essential, contradictory, and inherent feature of the mental capitalism and its economy of self-esteem. In order to reframe a polemical account of the contemporary tendency of global capitalist technoculture, I briefly characterize the critical perspectives on the attention economy by Jonathan Beller and Bernard Stiegler. Finally, I emphasize the role of ecological and ethical responsibility in interpersonal relations and structures of social practices in the situation of “fight for attention.” The tasks of visual ecology in the age of mental capitalism are an elaboration of productive criteria of visual pollution, organization of the new forms of community strategies and policies, through attentive reflection of images and media milieu in which they develop, which are able to reconcile the contradictions between the technical and the natural.