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ATTENTION ECONOMICS
The past year has seen a number of, um, "ambitious" promotions: Paper magazine laid what appeared to be a corpse in New York’s Grand Central Station as a publicity stunt. Spin staged a photo of a teen hanging himself with a belt for a fashion spread. A Limited employee training video shows battle footage and compares the retail mission to war, where "people really do live and people do die." Marketing guru John Douglas spoke about "Getting into the Mind of a Serial Killer" at a branding conference in Boston.
Such marketers are likely subscribers to what trendwatchers and people who read Wired know as "attention economics." This school of thought suggests that the booty in an information economy is not money, not goods, not even information, but "the one item that is both vastly desirable and singularly scarce–the attention paid by human beings." As attention economists see it, getting noticed amid the glut of media and advertising should be done by any means necessary. You need only to turn on a TV or log on the web to see how this works. Mass media and their advertisers literally thrive on school shootings, highway explosions, and like grisly matters.
Although the idea behind attention economics goes way back–after all, the word "advertise" means to get attention–it has never been articulated so starkly. If fact, so explicit are the new terms that they inadvertently expose the problem with a culture ruled by the market. By their measure, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold–who knew exactly what it takes to get attention–would be the nouveau riche. The other winners in such an economy (those who aren’t dead or in jail) triumph less for what they do than what they lack–adherence to any sort of values other than the market’s (communitarian values, for instance).
The C. Delores Tuckers who decry media violence can devise whatever insane measures they like, from carding at movies to mandatory poetry hours. The debate over whether this stuff is harmful or not is entirely beside the point; there will not be a decrease in violent media as long as it’s profitable. The one proposed measure that would curb the market’s power–restrictions on advertising–has been opposed on free speech grounds . . . ironically, I might add, for the market is the most pervasive censor of modern times. What’s profitable gets play; what’s not, doesn’t.
Blaming the media, the market system that controls it, or any one factor for inciting physical violence is, of course, a gross oversimplification. Nevertheless, the geniuses of the system will do anything for attention; they’ll appropriate, distort, and repurpose any and every human desire or experience for profit. This, too, is violence. While not the same as prompting every fifth grader to go blow away the neighbors, it denies the very basis for free speech–the unfettered competition of ideas and respect for other humans . . and, in so doing, creates a cultural climate mighty conducive to such acts.
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