Develops a critique of the concept of the attention economy from the perspectives of labour, time, and power.

In this essay, we will argue that acts of resistance within "attention economies" take the form of a wager isomorphic to the one delineated by Blaise Pascal in his Pensées. First, we examine the role of relevance in communication, interpretation, and understanding. Second, we turn to Cécile Malaspina's conception of noise, which allows us to grasp the intricate relation between judgment and uncertainty. Next, we exemplify our claim by analyzing David Foster Wallace's The Pale King and J.J. Voskuil's seven-volume (...) series Het Bureau. In both texts, noise as an epistemic and aesthetic technique operates on a diegetic and metatextual level. Rather than warranting efficiency and optimization through the filter model of attention, we will develop an ethics of noise that opens up the possibility to re-individuate the subject of "attention economies.". (shrink)

Develops a critique of the concept of the attention economy from the perspectives of labour, time, and power.

Social media companies commonly design their platforms in a way that renders them addictive. Some governments have declared internet addiction a major public health concern, and the World Health Organization has characterized excessive internet use as a growing problem. Our article shows why scholars, policy makers, and the managers of social media companies should treat social media addiction as a serious moral problem. While the benefits of social media are not negligible, we argue that social media addiction raises unique ethical (...) concerns not raised by other, more familiar addictive products, such as alcohol and cigarettes. In particular, we argue that addicting users to social media is impermissible because it unjustifiably harms users in a way that is both demeaning and objectionably exploitative. Importantly, the attention-economy business model of social media companies strongly incentivizes them to perpetrate this wrongdoing. (shrink)

Is it wrong to distract? Is it wrong to direct others’ attention in ways they otherwise would not choose? If so, what are the grounds of this wrong – and, in expounding them, do we have to at once condemn large chunks of contemporary digital commerce (also known as the attention economy)? In what follows, I attempt to cast light on these questions. Specifically, I argue – following the pioneering work of Jasper Tran and Anuj Puri – (...) that there is a right to attention, and that its existence underlies some of our claims regarding the wrongness of distractions. However, I depart from both these authors in two respects: first, I present a new way of deriving the right to attention, grounding it in the more fundamental right to mental integrity. Second, I remain agnostic on whether the contemporary business practices of capturing attention in exchange for a variety of digital products and services are plagued by routine violations of the right. (shrink)

A growing amount of media is paid for by its consumers through their very consumption of it. Typically, this new media is web-based and paid for by advertising. It includes the services offered by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. We offer an ethical assessment of the attention economy, the market where attention is exchanged for new media. We argue that the assessment has ethical implications for how the attention economy should be regulated. To conduct the (...) assessment, we employ two heuristics for evaluating markets. One is the “harm” criterion, which relates to whether the market tends to engender extremely harmful outcomes for individuals or society as a whole. The other is the “agency” criterion, which relates not to the outcomes of the market, but rather, to whether it somehow reflects or has its source in weakened agency. We argue that the attention economy animates concerns with respect to both criteria and that new media should be subject to the same sort of regulation as other harmful, addictive products. (shrink)

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers. Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of epistemic injustice. (...) We begin by outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention deficits harm those who are subject to them. We argue that epistemic attention deficits are harms in and of themselves because they deprive people of an essential component of epistemic agency. Moreover, epistemic attention deficits reduce an agent’s ability to participate in valuable epistemic practices. These two forms of harm have important impacts on educational performance and the distribution of resources. Finally, we argue that epistemic attention deficits both hinder and shape the development of epistemic agency. We finish by exploring some practical implications arising from our discussion. (shrink)

Is it wrong to distract? Is it wrong to direct others’ attention in ways they otherwise would not choose? If so, what are the grounds of this wrong – and, in expounding them, do we have to at once condemn large chunks of contemporary digital commerce (also known as the attention economy)? In what follows, I attempt to cast light on these questions. Specifically, I argue – following the pioneering work of Jasper Tran and Anuj Puri – (...) that there is a right to attention, and that its existence underlies some of our claims regarding the wrongness of distractions. However, I depart from both these authors in two respects: first, I present a new way of deriving the right to attention, grounding it in the more fundamental right to mental integrity. Second, I remain agnostic on whether the contemporary business practices of capturing attention in exchange for a variety of digital products and services are plagued by routine violations of the right. (shrink)

The future of human computation benefits from examining tasks that agents already perform and designing environments to give those tasks computational significance. We call this natural human computation. We consider the possible future of NHC through the lens of Swarm!, an application under development for Google Glass. Swarm! motivates users to compute the solutions to a class of economic optimization problems by engaging the attention dynamics of crowds. We argue that anticipating and managing economies of attention provides one (...) of the most tantalizing future applications for NHC. (shrink)

This talk by Dr. Peter D. Hershock makes use of Buddhist conceptual resources to assess how the emerging global attention economy and the confluence of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the human experience. Like the Copernican revolution, which de-centered humanity in the cosmos, the intelligence revolution is dissolving once-foundational certainties and opening new realms of opportunity. The results are almost sure to be mixed. Smart cities will be more efficient and more livable; smart health (...) care can potentially reach and benefit the half of humanity that now lacks even basic health services. Yet, smart services and the algorithmic tailoring of individual experience have the potential to first supplement and eventually supplant intelligent human practices, rendering human intelligence superfluous. Focusing in particular on the karmic dimensions of these transformations, the talk will consider who we need to be present as in order to resist the allure of digital sirens and direct the intelligence revolution toward a truly equitable and ethical re-centering of the human. (shrink)

In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a (...) flurry of books making “self-help” arguments about how we could live happier, more fulfilling lives if we were less addicted to our phones. But none of these authors see this issue as one involving a moral duty to protect our autonomy. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives (...) in order to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

Time is in short supply, so my argument will be condensed, and therefore apparently dogmatic. I will sketch seven reasons why we should distance ourselves both from the promotion of "impact" as an appropriate measure of a scholar's output and from its knee-jerk rejection as a scandalous, oppressive and humiliating form of control of scholarly work.1 My main points will be that we all crave impact (understandably), that the current definition of "impact" tends to hide what it claims to reveal (...) (and should therefore be rejected), but, more importantly, that the very framing of "impact" rests on an obsolete conception of how and why we do research. To put it bluntly: we still hang on to the traditional idea that .. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only (...) class='Hi'>attention, but self- control, and addiction as well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth & Castro, 2021; Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, 2018; Aylsworth & Castro, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, 2018). -/- Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency. (shrink)

This article examines the industrial art of videogame design and production as an exemplar of what could be termed affective design. In doing so, the article theorizes the relationship between affect and attention as part of what Bernard Stiegler calls a ‘retentional economy’ of human and technical memory. Through the examination of a range of different videogames, the article argues that videogame designers utilize techniques of what I term ‘affective amplification’ that seek to modulate affect, which is central (...) to the commercial success of these games. The article considers how the concepts of amplification, modulation and bandwidth, developed through this example, inform and expand understandings of this retentional economy by analysing the ways in which affective design attempts to transmit and translate the potential for affect through a range of technical systems and environments. (shrink)

How should we conceptualise the turn to attention as a means of producing surplus value? Claudio Celis Bueno answers this question through a consideration of the attention economy in the context of a rethinking of Marxist political economy. Bueno accounts for the development of the economisation of attention through the concepts of value, labour and time, but also investigates how the shift to attention requires us to rethink the basis of these terms. Using the (...) attention economy as an example, he develops a method of immanent critique which rejects a-historical understandings of labour, in order to show how the core concepts of Marxist political economy transform across different economic systems. Despite the clarity of this argument, Bueno opens an interesting but unanswered question as to how one transitions from this insight to a positive political project that may not be compatible with immanent critique. (shrink)

This paper assesses the role of attention in learning by comparing the effects that different reading modalities and participation practices have in learning, and uses book clubs as venues of learning interactions. Specifically, this paper presents the basic findings of a case study conducted on a gender mixed crime fiction face-to-face book club in Athens. Based on grounded theory methodology, the results indicate that exchanges are framed in terms of an agonistic “gift economy” and circulate among two basic (...) reading modalities grounded in different structures of paying attention and invested with different cognitive value: a) a deep –effortless- immersion of attention in the momentary experience of reading and b) a deep -effortful- re-reading which divides time in order to obtain deeper insight. The study locates a group of marginalized women, who are unable to enter the agonistic exchange cycle as givers and stay in a permanent ‘cognitive debt’. The construction of regimes of worth among members has implications for the study of interactions in many learning environments. In this respect, this paper attempts to bring together insights from social sciences and cognitive theories, in order to open up a fruitful dialogue between the two with pedagogical implications and future cross-disciplinary research directions. (shrink)

While driving, one night, Chris got distracted by a notification on his phone and provoked the car accident that killed his fiancé. Smithereens is centered on the idea that digital devices are constantly calling for our attention and that their design makes their use addictive. This happens because big internet companies are earning a fortune through a new economic model based precisely on the managing of attention and the extraction of behavioral data. This chapter looks at the reasons (...) and strategies behind the monetization of attention and considers the dynamics through which a pathological use of online platforms and digital devices is forced on the user. (shrink)

The commodification of silence responding to a disturbing environment is integrated in the growing attention economy. This paper suggests that the idea of silence embedded in these products preclude fruitful understandings of—and interventions in—theproblematics they address, and it proposes Cage’s silence as a more efficacious model for understanding our problems with a disturbing environment, and a better practice for intervening in it. Informed by Yves Citton’s ecology of attention the paper argues that Cage’s silence centers the interplay (...) of attention, subjectivity and intentionality, as it takes play between us and the background, which to some extent produces us. And finally, it suggests that the Cagean practice of paying attention to this background is what Citton calls a “micropolitics of attention”, because it reveals the background as a battleground. (shrink)

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control. While this push back is important, current societal debates on the ethics of persuasive technologies are informed (...) by a particular understanding of attention, rarely posited explicitly yet assumed as the default. They share the same concept of attention, namely an individualistic and descriptive concept of attention that is a cognitive process, an expendable resource, something that one should control individually. We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, turning to Buddhist ethics to formulate a critique of persuasive technology from a genuinely ethical perspective. Buddhist ethics points at our attention’s inescapable ethical and ontological embeddedness. Attention as practice requires “the right effort” to distinguish desirable and undesirable states, the “right concentration” to stop the flow we are caught in, and the “right mindfulness” to fortify the ability to attend to the present situation and keep in mind a general sense of life’s direction. We offer input for further philosophical inquiry on attention as practice and attention ecology. We put forward comfort/effort and individualism/collectivism as two remaining central tensions in need of further research. (shrink)

Résumé Dans certaines situations, les comportements réels des individus peuvent apparaître comme des anomalies dans le cadre de la théorie classique de l’agent rationnel. La théorie comportementale vise à expliquer ces anomalies, en particulier celles relatives aux préférences sociales. L’objet de cet article est de montrer comment l’économie expérimentale a permis de mieux mesurer et de mieux caractériser ces préférences. Sur la base d’une revue très sélective d’expériences, nous montrons comment s’est établi un dialogue fructueux entre l’analyse des comportements en (...) laboratoire et la théorie autour de la question de l’attention à l’autre en situation d’interaction stratégique. (shrink)

Dans la surabondance de données mises à notre disposition par l'informatisation de nos sociétés, comment parvenir à filtrer les quelques éléments pertinents nécessaires à nourrir nos réflexions et inventions à venir, tout en parvenant à laisser en arrière-fond la masse écrasante de données sans pertinence ? Le problème tient à ce que la définition même des pertinences ne préexiste pas aux données. Elle est en partie issue des nouvelles données elles-mêmes, ce qui conduit à affoler toutes nos boussoles. La question (...) centrale peut donc se formuler de la façon suivante : comment ' traiter ' les données (nouvelles) sans que ce traitement ne neutralise leurs virtualités émergentes ? Autrement dit : comment concevoir une ' multiversité ' assez ouverte et accueillante pour être ' créative ', sans pour autant se dissoudre dans le multiple d'une diversité amorphe ? On peut aborder cette question en esquissant trois pistes superposées. (shrink)

The Onlife Manifesto rightfully points to the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in the digital age and how ICT calls for the re-distribution of tasks and responsibilities between humans and their technologies. However, Attention is still conceived in the Manifesto in modernist terms, as a problem of distraction. Within the terminology of Attention economy, the Manifesto is critical about the abuse of traditional forms of Attention, but does not make the next step to develop an (...) alternative. In this chapter, I elaborate on the notion of Attention and think of its new form in the digital age. A genealogy of the notion shows how Attention reflects the dominant technologies of a period. In the age of the printed book, Attention meant focusing on one activity at a time, and the background had to be silent and unnoticeable. In the age of radio and television, when stations and channels were switched with a single button, Attention was still focused on a single item but for shorter periods of time. Today, in the age of multi-processor computers and cell phones, Attention is distributed among tasks. In its distributed form, Attention can provide a subversive answer to the Attention economy that requires our undivided Attention. (shrink)

The author thematizes the operation of the political market of attention that is propelled by the willingness of citizens to credit populist leaders with their digital political labour. Mutual, nevertheless unequal, exchange of attention leads to the formation of a spiral of attention. Its expansive character is sustained by the strategically subsidized recognition of populist leaders. Accumulated attention, i. e. attention capital, is the resource that is used to maintain populist networked public spheres, while citizens (...) are proletarianized: they are invited to apply their labour power to distributing political ideas but are pevented from evaluating the influence of competing public actors. (shrink)

The attention economy — the market where consumers’ attention is exchanged for goods and services — poses a variety of threats to individuals’ autonomy, which, at minimum, involves the ability to set and pursue ends for oneself. It has been argued that the threat wireless mobile devices pose to autonomy gives rise to a duty to oneself to be a digital minimalist, one whose interactions with digital technologies are intentional such that they do not conflict with their (...) ends. In this paper, we argue that there is a corresponding duty to others to be an attention ecologist, one who promotes digital minimalism in others. Although the moral reasons for being an attention ecologist are similar to those that motivate the duty to oneself, the arguments diverge in important ways. We explore the application of this duty in various domains where we have special obligations to promote autonomy in virtue of the different roles we play in the lives of others, such as parents and teachers. We also discuss the consequences of our arguments for employers, software developers, and policy makers. (shrink)

We demonstrate “economies of experience” in eye-movement patterns—that is, optimization of eye-movement patterns aimed at more efficient and less costly visual processing, similar to the priming-induced formation of sparser cortical representations or reduced reaction times. Participants looked at Mooney-type, degraded stimuli that were difficult to recognize without prior experience, but easily recognizable after exposure to their undegraded versions. As predicted, eye-movement dispersion, velocity, and the number of fixations decreased with each stimulus presentation. Further analyses showed that this effect was contingent (...) on recognition, and the selection of information from the stimulus could be informed by the identity of the presented object. Finally, our study demonstrates that after exposure to the undegraded version of the stimulus, eye-movement patterns associated with its degraded and undegraded versions become more similar. This suggests that eye-movement patterns can evolve to facilitate the optimal processing of a given stimulus via experience-driven perceptual learning. (shrink)

Un revenu inconditionnel d’existence devrait être envisagé au sein d’une pluralité de formes de revenus, basés sur des logiques hétérogènes. Parmi ces justifications, la prise en compte des dynamiques de l’économie de l’attention (dont Google et Facebook tirent d’ores et déjà des revenus énormes) pourrait jouer un rôle central. Un revenu d’existence apparaîtrait alors comme un investissement social permettant à chacun(e) de diriger son attention vers ce qui lui semble le plus important. Mais cela impliquerait de passer d’une (...) économie restreinte à une économie générale, dans laquelle le moment de l’attention réflexive ne serait pas considéré comme un luxe inutile, mais comme un besoin d’avenir. (shrink)

This open access book looks at how a democracy can devolve into a post-factual state. The media is being flooded by populist narratives, fake news, conspiracy theories and make-believe. Misinformation is turning into a challenge for all of us, whether politicians, journalists, or citizens. In the age of information, attention is a prime asset and may be converted into money, power, and influence – sometimes at the cost of facts. The point is to obtain exposure on the air and (...) in print media, and to generate traffic on social media platforms. With information in abundance and attention scarce, the competition is ever fiercer with truth all too often becoming the first victim. Reality Lost: Markets of Attention, Misinformation and Manipulation is an analysis by philosophers Vincent F. Hendricks and Mads Vestergaard of the nuts and bolts of the information market, the attention economy and media eco-system which may pave way to postfactual democracy. Here misleading narratives become the basis for political opinion formation, debate, and legislation. To curb this development and the threat it poses to democratic deliberation, political self-determination and freedom, it is necessary that we first grasp the mechanisms and structural conditions that cause it. (shrink)

The duality of attention is explored by turning our focus to the political and cultural conceptions of automatic attention and deliberate attention, with the former being associated with animality and “uncivilized” behavior and the latter with intelligence and self-mastery. In this article, I trace this ongoing dualism of the mind from early race psychology in the late nineteenth century to twentieth century psychological models including those found in psychoanalysis, behaviorism, neo-behaviorism, and behavioral economics. These earlier studies explicitly (...) or implicitly maintained a deficiency model of controlled attention and other mental processes that were thought to differ between racial groups. Such early models of attention included assumptions that Black and Indigenous peoples were less in control of their attention compared to whites. This racialized model of attention, as seen in the law of economy in the nineteenth century, with similar manifestations in psychoanalysis and neo-behaviorism in the twentieth century, can now be seen in present-day dual-process models as used in current psychological research and behavioral policy. These historical connections show that attention is not a value-neutral term and that attention studies do not stand outside of race and structural racism. (shrink)

The sharing economy has transformed economic transactions, created new organizational forms, and contributed to changes in consumer culture. Started as a movement with promises of a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive economy, the sharing economy, and its impact on issues such as privacy, discrimination, worker rights, and regulation, is now the subject of heated debate. Many of these issues root in the changes that digital technologies have brought and the unresolved moral and ethical questions emerging therefrom. This (...) special issue contributes to this ongoing debate with five articles that develop theoretical frameworks and conduct empirical investigations, providing fine-grained analyses of urgent issues in the sharing economy. In this article, we highlight these and other issues that we believe deserve further attention from business ethics scholarship. (shrink)

In the popular and academic literature on the problems of the so-called attention economy, the cost of attention grabbing, sustaining, and immersing digital medias has been addressed as if it touched all people equally. In this paper I ask whether everyone has the same resources to respond to the recent changes in their stimulus environments caused by the attention economy. I argue that there are not only differences but disparities between people in their responses to (...) the recent, significant increase in the degree and persuasiveness of digital distraction. I point toward individual variance in an agent’s top-down and bottom-up attention regulation, and to further inequality-exacerbating variance in active participation on the internet and in regulating reward-seeking behaviors on the internet. Individual differences in these areas amount to disparities because they have been found to be connected to socioeconomic background factors. I argue that disparities in responding to digital distraction threaten fair equality of opportunity when it comes to digital distraction in the classroom and that they may lead to an unequal contribution of achievements that require complex cognition by people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. (shrink)

L'usage du monde numérique, et plus particulièrement de l'Internet, crée des traces qui constituent la source de services que les utilisateurs contribuent à personnaliser eux-mêmes. En échangeant leurs favoris, leurs photos, leurs informations de toutes sortes, les utilisateurs révèlent leurs préférences et renforcent l'utilité du service qu'ils sont en train d'utiliser. Une première génération de services s'appuie sur les mécanismes d'une rationalité exploratoire, tirant bénéfice du savoir collectif . Une seconde génération de services va plus loin en utilisant les préférences (...) déclarées pour connecter des individus « qui se ressemblent » . Ces évolutions suggèrent le passage d'une économie de stock à une économie de flux où le bien rare est moins l'information que l'attention nécessaire pour la traiter. Elles ont des conséquences sur la gestion de l'identité numérique des individus et rend de moins opérant la notion juridique de la privacy.Using the digital world, and especially the Internet, generates traces that become the basis for services which are customised by the contributions of users themselves. As they share their favourites, photos and information of all kinds, users not only disclose their preferences but also strengthen the utility of the service they are using. Some first-generation services rely on mechanisms based on exploratory rationality and drawing on collective knowledge . A second type of service goes a step further by using displayed preferences to connect people who are "alike" . These trends suggest a switch from a stock-based economy to a flow-based economy, where the most valuable asset is not information as such but the attention it attracts. These developments are creating issues relating to the management of individual digital identities, and bringing the relevance of the legal notion of privacy into question. (shrink)

Although the architectonic of Plato’s best city is dazzling, some critics find its detailed prescriptions inimical to human freedom and well-being. Most notably, Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies sees it as a proto-totalitarian recipe, choking all initiative and variety out of the citizenry. This essay does not directly respond to Popper’s critique but instead spotlights a strand in the dialogue that positions Plato as an advocate of regulatory relaxation and economic liberty to an extent otherwise unknown (...) in the ancient world and by no means unopposed in ours. His contribution to liberal political economy thereby merits greater attention and respect. (shrink)

What precisely does a distraction threaten? An agent who spends an inordinate amount of time attending to her smartphone – what precisely is she lacking? I argue that whereas agency of attention is the agent’s non-automatic decision-making on what she currently pays attention to, autonomy of attention is the agent, through her second-order desires, effectively interfering with her non-automatic decision-making on what she currently pays attention to. Freedom of attention is the agent’s possibility to hold (...) or switch her focus of attention without fixating on any specific focus against her will or without distraction from chosen foci. This conceptual work provides resources to track manipulations that diminish a person’s freedom of attention. (shrink)

This article addressed historical aspects of the political economy involving sustained forest ecology in Sierra Leone as a whole, with emphasis on the Freetown Peninsula and its surrounding communities. Attention is paid to cultural, social and economic aspects involving forest livelihoods of residents on the Freetown Peninsula and far afield. The term 'Political Economy' is used in this situation to denote the relationship between the economics of people's livelihoods and public policy (in relation to the management of (...) legislative procedures) in ensuring that resources in the forest environment is sustainably managed to cater for the livelihood needs of people in Sierra Leone, while at the same time maintaining a balance in protecting the forest ecosystems. The paper has provided a critical review of the political economy of forest ecology in the country on the basis of scholarly discourses, and its applicability in adapting to the fragile political administrative management Sierra Leone have (and is continuing to) experienced. (shrink)

In an economy that increasingly trades in electronic information products, the copy assumes a new reversibility, as a figure at once valued for its rapid exchangeability and vilified for of its associations with counterfeit and fraud. The incorporation of confidence measures into the design of electronic information products is symptomatic of a primary crisis of belief installed within empiricist epistemologies, of which anti-circumvention technologies and knock-off economies are merely the incorrigible children. The aesthetic strategies practiced by Albert Oehlen and (...) N.E. Thing Co., which mirror the information hiding techniques employed by steganography software and technologies of trust as well as the circumvention tactics employed to defeat them, register an emergent preoccupation in contemporary visual culture with structures of belief. They also disclose a Humean attention to processes of devivification, which figures in these artists’ work as an effect of the multiplication of the same. The trope of the ‘false bottom’ deployed in the 1930s novels of British artist and author Wyndham Lewis serves as intertext in this genealogical investigation of the politics of circumvention. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the reflections on economic issues underlying the French political treatise Le Conseiller d’Estat (1632). Its aim is to add a piece to the puzzle of early seventeenth-century economic culture by examining a specific source that is especially significant on account of the importance it assigns to the economic dimension, within the framework of reflections on the raison d'État, paying particular attention to the connection between economics and politics. At the same time, from a more general (...) perspective, the article aims to highlight the significance of the reflections on economics to be found in seventeenth-century political treatises. These remain to be reconstructed in all of their complexity, and yet they constitute a genuine legacy of the European economic culture of the Early Modern Age, and one which only partly found its way into eighteenth-century thought. (shrink)

Prior research on corporate misconduct pays extensive attention to single misconduct behaviors. However, little research has addressed recidivism – the repeated behaviors of corporate misconduct. Based on institutional theory and using the context of emerging economies where recidivism plays a considerable role, we propose the path dependency of corporate recidivism and suggest that three influential factors exist: internal preconditioning, inter-organizational imitation, and the prevailing external evaluation. Our event history analysis of 1,036 listed companies in China over the period 2001–2008 (...) statistically confirms our hypotheses. We conclude the paper by outlining the implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

What is the role of attention in the dialectics of memory and communication? How far is attention functioning as a medium? Which role does attention play in the information management practices? Attention is not only fundamental to human existence but also to the process of understanding. If understanding is mediated by memory and communication then attention can be identified with the medium. So whenever you search to explain the role and mechanisms of memory in the (...) information society, the question of attention is asked immediately. Furthermore, attention can be analyzed under the following topics: as cognitive process, as subjective, intersubjective and cultural phenomenon, and as resource and medium within an 'Attention Economy'. Whereas the first aspect has to be seen in the context of empirical studies in psychology and cognitive sciences, the phenomenological, cultural, and economic aspects seem to have common points and similar implications in their theoretical approaches. In the last twenty years, the notion of attention has been the central core of several discourses in German phenomenology, economy and cultural studies. Similar to Georg Franck's theory of mental capitalism, the idea of an attention economy also was followed up in the American discourse. This article is supposed to explore the role of attention and its function as a medium within communication, cultural memory and science. (shrink)

In this article, I show that Hegel’s philosophical articulation of the family is inextricably bound to his engagement with political economy by focusing on three central aspects of his theory of the family. Firstly, I analyze how Hegel construes the family as a historically distinct social dispositif and constitutive element of the modern order of property. I argue that Hegel’s construction of the family and its place in the modern order of property is not only gendered but also racialized. (...) Secondly, I focus on Hegel’s articulation of the nexus between the family and civil society and his critical diagnosis of the structural problems that result from it. Thirdly, I discuss Hegel’s concept of labor and the political-epistemic limitations of his problematization of civil society, which are bound to it. I draw attention to three aspects, namely the confinement of the concept of labor to civil society, Hegel’s rearticulation of the gendered matter/form distinction, and the relation between Hegel’s economic notion and speculative usage of “labor.” Finally, I consider briefly how a critical reading of Hegel’s articulation of the political economy of the family can provide productive insights for a multidimensional theory of the family today. (shrink)

In a congressional hearing in the spring of 1996, talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford was charged with endorsing clothing made in Honduran sweatshops by exploited children. Resulting media coverage focused public attention on a seamy underside of the "global economy." Redemption strategies used by Gifford and her public relations consultant, and repeated and promoted through the mass media, fed a larger controversy over the meaning of the concept of the global economy and its ethical implications for (...) the American public. (shrink)

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible (...) to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis. (shrink)

This study examines the theory of media systems and the models offered by Hallin and Mancini (2004) by focusing on critical junctures in which changes occur. Based on critical political economy and historical institutionalism, we analyzed the Israeli media system transition in the 1980s and early 1990s, seeking to understand the nature of this change and its theoretical implications. Our findings show a combination of government, market, and public forces in a unique situation where political, economic, and social circumstances (...) change. Accordingly, we conclude that a distinction between politics and economy, as the media system theory and, specifically, the liberal model suggests, is invalid under neoliberalism. We argue that research attention should be paid to critical junctions, and that a closer analysis of government and market interrelations can enrich theories of media systems. (shrink)

It has been debated whether the so-called attention economy, in which the attention of agents is measured and sold, jeopardizes something of value. One strand of this discussion has focused on so-called attention rights, asking: should attention be legally protected, either by introducing novel rights or by extending the scope of pre-existing rights? In this paper, however, in order to further this discussion, we ask: How is attention already protected legally? In what situations does (...) a person have the right to attention under current law? -/- Unlike (Chomanski, Neuroethics 16:1–11, 2023), who discusses an overall right to attention, or (Puri, Rutgers Law Record 48:206–221, 2021), who discusses an overall right to attentional privacy, in this paper we focus on two types of situations in which a person’s attention is already protected by legal regulation. Sustained attention-requiring tasks can be jeopardized by distractions whereas attentiveness to certain kind of stimuli can be jeopardized by immersive stimuli. That is why distractions are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a concentration right and immersive stimuli are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a duty to be attentive. The further analysis of these situations provides an understanding of the legal means by which attention is already regulated, which can be helpful when thinking about how it should be regulated in the future. (shrink)

With the expansion of multinational corporations (MNCs), the alarming upsurge in widely publicized and notable corporate scandals involving MNCs in emerging markets has begun to draw both academic and managerial attention to look beyond home market practices to the pressing concern of CSR in emerging markets. Previous studies on CSR have focused primarily on Western markets, reserving limited discussions in addressing the issue of MNC attitudes and CSR practices in their emerging host markets abroad. Despite this incongruity in academic (...) response to CSR in emerging markets, managers of multinational companies continue to face mounting and most often conflicting pressures to weigh among multiple strategic CSR responses in emerging markets. Such a task is often further complicated by the complexity of varying business norms and standards, regulatory environments, and stakeholder demands for CSR across national boundaries. With such a challenge in mind, I attempt to examine the explanatory factors in leading MNCs, otherwise recognized for accountability and integrity in their home markets, to employ inconsistent or negligent practices under CSR pressure in Chinese emerging economy. Preliminary findings reveal that discrepancies exist in how MNCs perform in CSR in home countries versus in host countries. While MNCs do have much to improve, the institutional environment in the emerging market, including the legal framework and the ethical culture, also needs to be improved by the host country governments, the industry associations, and local firms. Meanwhile, media interest and journalists, NGOs, third party monitors, industry stakeholders as well as consumer advocacy groups can raise the visibility of MNC's contradictory practices between their origin nations and countries with emerging economies and offer the pressures and incentives for MNCs to amend their ethical short-comings. This article also suggests implications for both theory and practice. (shrink)

This article critically examines the paradigm shift from the attention economy to the intimacy economy—a market system where personal and emotional data are exchanged for customized experiences that cater to individual emotional and psychological needs. It explores how AI transforms these personal and emotional inputs into services, thereby raising essential questions about the authenticity of digital interactions and the potential commodification of intimate experiences. The study delineates the roles of human–computer interaction and AI in deepening personal connections, (...) significantly impacting emotional dynamics, and underscores AI’s role in various applications, from healthcare to grief tech, highlighting both enhancements in emotional connections and potential disruptions to genuine human interactions. An AI-mediated framework (AMIE) is introduced to assess how AI reshapes these connections and the overall digital society through personalized interactions. This framework explores the interplay between human emotions and AI-generated responses within the new Avatar Sphere, emphasizing the necessity for regulatory measures to safeguard digital identities, recognize emotional data as intellectual property, and maintain system transparency. It highlights the critical need for maintaining genuine human interactions and advocates for context-aware consent, continuous monitoring, and cross-cultural considerations to foster ethical AI practices. Leveraging blockchain technology and decentralized autonomous organizations, the framework proposes methods to enhance individual control over emotional data, mitigating the commodification risks. The findings contribute to ongoing discussions on AI ethics, digital privacy, and the future of human-AI interactions, providing valuable insights for cultivating a responsible intimacy economy. (shrink)