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The Marketplace of Attention, by James G Webster
AUTHOR James Webster is a Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His book reflects his scholarly, interdisciplinary approach, but will be of interest to groups beyond fellow academics.
Both people working in or associated with the media will benefit from his insights, as will anyone with a concern for the world of ideas. For this group, The Marketplace of Attention will shed light on how digital technologies influence popular culture and the public discourse.
There are many startling statistics about the growth of digital media: 500 million tweets are sent each day; 100 million hours of new YouTube videos are uploaded every minute; the number of words written each day are enough to fill all the books in the US Library of Congress; and worldwide, advertisers spend about $500bn a year to reach an audience.
New media, and the audiences it gathers, has always generated concern. In the fourth century BC, Plato worried that the “new” technology of writing would “encourage forgetfulness and weaken people’s minds”. Early in the twentieth century, thoughtful people worried that film and radio would “manipulate the passions and opinions of gullible mass publics”. Our era has its own set of concerns, and it is useful to know that mankind dealt successfully with the others, and will do so again.
Until recently media content was connected to specific modes of distribution. If you wished to see a movie you went to the cinema; you bought your news from a newspaper seller on your way to or from work, or had it delivered. To watch TV, you went home and waited for the broadcast. Digital media, in stark contrast, is not limited by time or place. It offers people innumerable ways to consume it, and to do this at the time of their choosing.
Doomed to obscurity among tsunami of content
All creators of media want attention. They want attention to “amuse, build social capital, make money, or change the course of human events", Professor Webster notes. One of the many reasons that makes grabbing attention difficult is that people’s attention is limited. There are only so many hours in the day and it is a zero-sum game: if one thing wins attention another cannot. The result is that much of the tsunami of media content, is doomed to obscurity.
There are many reasons why understanding what changes public attention is more important now than it has ever been. With important events dominating our thinking and discussion - both here in South Africa and in the most powerful country in the history of the world, the US - understanding what we hear, and do not hear, is profoundly significant.
For instance, how does the abundance of digital media affect how people are informed and make decisions? It is so easy now to avoid what you dislike and to “retreat into enclaves of comfortable, like-minded speech”, Webster points out. “Complex findings do not cater to punchy headlines and thus seldom receive the same level of attention as apocalyptic warnings.” That which is simplified into a headline can easily be misunderstood as characterising the whole issue.
In the past, if an idea was on a broadcast network, it reached a mass audience because all people had the same limited options. The digital world has changed all this.
The marketplace of attention is a highly structured world, and Professor Webster offers a useful and accessible theoretical framework for explaining how it works.
The interplay of media and audiences generally does not have a simple, one-directional explanation. Is a website popular because Google recommends it, or does Google recommend it because it’s popular? Additionally, everyone’s media choices are influenced by their social networks, the many groups people belong to: family, friends, social or business organisations. Often these groups will have an ‘opinion leader’, who is active in directing members’ attention to some things and not others.
What messages get through to people are compounded by the volume of digital media, and how our attention does not go from the front page of the newspaper we purchased, to the last. If it did, we would be following one media house’s views on everything from politics to the economy to social values, and even what is defined as news.
Thought structures are a force to be reckoned with. Some of these structures, social or media, are obvious and others are not; some are closed to a variety of different ideas, and other are open.
For example, people who are politically conservative might succeed in connecting only with other like-minded conservative people, and consume conservative content. This could move them to ever more extreme positions, fuelling “echo chambers” where they hear only their own voices. This leads to “group polarisation”, where they meet only other politically conservative people.
Where systems are open they encourage the crosscutting meeting of ideas, have the potential to limit “echo chamber” downward spirals, and might even promote more robust, public debate.
Thought structures can be obvious or concealed. Most people know which channels and websites specialise in different kinds of content, and so turn to them more naturally. Concealed structures, however, work behind the scenes. Users may have no idea that they are operating within a structured environment.
English speakers mainly use English-speaking sites, not Chinese ones, and so are limited to a Western view of the world. We use recommendations, for example ‘the top ten phones of 2016’, where the criteria of choice of the top 10 are far less clear, despite the impression that we are exposing ourselves to choice.
In the early 1970s, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon famously observed: “... a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
We are swamped by media and it affects our thought processes, decisions and judgment. The more we know about media, the better. This book is very helpful in that regard.
Readability: Light ---+ Serious
Insights: High +---- Low
Practical: High ----+ Low
* Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.
