... it should be evident how modern media platforms have become the key instruments of attention economy with ultimate devotion to capitalism of the digital status. The concept of digital economy ties the essential strands together.
Aderemi Medupin
Originators of the Terms
There is this question: Who coined the term digital capitalism? A version of the story claims that Don Tapscott first coined the term in his 1995 best-selling book The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. Then, we have the version that accompanies his book, Digital Capitalism which claims that, under the sway of expansionary market logic, the Internet began a political-economic transition toward what Dan Schiller calls "digital capitalism." Combined, what has crystalized is the fact that a phase of capitalism developed over the internet, creating a wide network economy supporting corporate business processes.
Essence of Digital Capitalism
A general description of digital capitalism is that it operates as a system in which social and economic dynamics revolve around digital corporations and their infrastructures, with its three main components, namely: e-business, e-business infrastructure and e-commerce. Two countries stand out in terms of capacity to engage in and benefit from the data-driven digital economy: the United States and China, both accounting for about 90 per cent of the market capitalization of the world's largest digital platforms. Needless to emphasize, at the foundation of digital capitalism is technology and as Matthew Cole, Hugo Radice and Charles Umney pointed out in their article, “The Political Economy of Datafication and Work: A New Digital Taylorism?”, published in Vol. 57 of Socialist Register 2021: themed: Beyond Digital Capitalism. New Ways of Living, edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo:
The economic and social consequences of technological change in capitalist societies have always been profound. For capitalists themselves, new technologies can have pervasive effects, rendering obsolete even the most profitable businesses, while simultaneously creating opportunities for early adopters. For workers reliant on the sale of their labour power, the effects are even more differentiated: new technologies create opportunities for those who can acquire necessary skills, but destitution for those whose capabilities are no longer required. Beyond the immediate economic outcomes for individuals and their communities, there are spatial, organizational, and cultural consequences that transform the fabric of society.
Google has pointed to the two broad branches of the digital economy as being (i) narrow scope-with the digital economy comprising digital services and the platform-based economy; and (ii) broad scope-that is, the digitalized economy comprising digitalized sectors such as e-business, e-commerce, advanced manufacturing, precision agriculture, algorithmic economy, sharing economy, and gig economy.
The reader may want to see the true essence of these conceptual categories, so, here we go: Precision agriculture (PA) is a farming management concept based on observing, measuring and responding to inter- and intra-field variability in crops. PA is also sometimes referred to as precision farming, satellite agriculture, as-needed farming and site-specific crop management (SSCM). Examples of precision agriculture technologies include GPS and mapping systems, sensors, remote sensing technologies, satellite imagery, variable rate application equipment, autonomous vehicles, and drones. On its part, algorithmic economy is a term used to describe the increasing role that algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) play in modern economic systems.
The sharing economy is an economic model defined as a peer-to-peer (P2P) based activity of acquiring, providing, or sharing access to goods and services that is often facilitated by a community-based online platform. Thus, as examples, the sharing economy is being developed in all sectors as you can see from this list of sharing economy companies, namely: Transport: car sharing (Liftshare), renting between individuals, shared transport vehicles (Uber); Housing: sharing amongst individuals (Airbnb), and house sharing (HomeExchange).
A gig economy is a free market system in which temporary positions are common and organizations hire independent workers for short-term commitments. The term "gig" is a slang word for a job that lasts a specified period of time. It is characterized by flexibility, zero hour contracts, self-employment, workers paid for limited contracts, and people engaging in more than one job. The essential characteristic of a gig economy is that it is an on-demand, a task-based economy that entails the exchange of labour for money amidst individuals and the activities are coordinated via a digital platform, i.e. it connects the service providers to the customers, on a short term basis. As summed up by Wikipedia, gig workers are independent contractors, online platform workers, contract firm workers, on-call workers, and temporary workers. Gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company's clients. Examples of work in the gig economy include but not limited to the following: Delivery driver, Tutor, Graphic designer, Freelance writer, Electrician, etc.
As to be expected, there are negative effects of the gig economy such as isolation and lack of workplace culture. This comes from the fact that often, gig economy workers work remotely and thus miss out on the relationships and social aspects of the workplace. While this offers flexibility, it can also lead to isolation from coworkers. On a long term basis of consideration, there are two disadvantages of working in the gig economy that deserve being highlighted: (a) No safety net. Since you will not receive healthcare and retirement benefits as a gig worker, it can be difficult to feel secure in the gig economy; and (b) Also, if a company needs to reduce their payroll, a gig worker's contract may be at risk. As lucidly couched on the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung platform in 2021, “trapped in bogus or disguised self-employment, which means that they are not protected by labour laws, these workers are left without institutional power.” However, at the same time, some benefits are credited to a gig economy. In specific terms, the result of a gig economy produces cheaper, more efficient, and flexible services that can offer consumers a unique and fast alternative to regular, standardized business. In addition, it is solely operated through the internet, making it an extremely popular choice for the younger demographic.
One of the most critical commentaries on the nature of digital capitalism is from the duo, Aitor Jiménez and J.C. Oleson, in their 2022 article, "The Crimes of Digital Capitalism," which appeared in Mitchell Hamline Law Review: Vol. 48, in which they recalled how: The European Union (EU), among other polities, has illuminated the ways in which hegemonic digital platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Uber have disrupted the way the public understands competition, democracy, information, and data privacy. They illustrated “the crimes of digital capitalism” with references to “multiple court rulings and public investigations which have established that the data of 85 million Facebook users were traded, exposed, and commodified for political purpose in violation, not only of Facebook’s own terms and conditions, but of various national and international laws and treaties. (Without doubt) such data exploitation threatens the privacy of users. And although these privacy concerns are serious, they are not the only threat”. The picture will become clearer when we bring in the attention economy.
Essentials of Attention economy
At a broad level and as recalled by the Berkeley Economic Review Staff in the journal’s March 2020 edition, the American Psychological Association defines attention as “a state in which cognitive resources are focused on certain aspects of the environment rather than on others.” Attention comes in many forms: love, recognition, obedience, and help. Although theoretically unquantifiable, many derive attention’s value from how much time we focus on a particular thing. We face attention’s scarcity every day; while “paying attention” to one thing we ignore others. Cascaded down, the term attention economy refers to the range of economic activities based on people's attention being treated as a scarce and highly desirable resource to be captured and maintained. In essence, attention economy is made up of anything trying to capture our limited attention. Because companies are able to profit from our attention, there is intense competition within the attention economy. The attention economy rests on the idea that attention is a scarce resource to compete for. In this digital economy, trade is increasingly built around information rather than physical commodities. However, information is not scarce as we are conversant with the notion of information explosion or information overload; rather, the limiting factor is human attention.
According to the United Nations Economist Network, the concept of attention economy was first coined in the late 1960s by Herbert A. Simon, characterizing the problem of information overload as an economic one. However, the concept has become increasingly popular with the rise of the internet making content (supply) increasingly abundant and immediately available, and attention becoming the limiting factor in the consumption of information. While the supply of accessible information has continued to grow rapidly - digital data roughly doubles every two years - the demand for information is limited by the scarce attention we can give to it. Indeed, the total available attention is limited by the number of people with access to information and the fixed number of hours in a day and conflicting demands on our time and attention. This logically links with the subject, "economics of attention" which as an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.
We are increasingly living in an “attention economy” rather than an “information economy”. According to Matthew Crawford, "Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it." As clarified by the Berkeley Economic Review staff, “our attention has always been limited, valuable, and scarce. But what distinguishes the present day is that technological advances have made an overwhelming amount of information available, strategically aimed at capturing our attention. As for the general public, it has never been easier to garner such personal levels of attention though means like social media”.
YouTube is a good example of how attention economy works. It lets content creators upload content from all around the world, then serves the most relevant content to each of its users. The content that cuts through then gets a share of advertising revenue. In exchange for greater convenience, consumers have to authorize access to their personal information, which puts data security at risk. Moreover, consumers’ preference data gets collected to personalize advertising and entice shoppers, resulting in irrational and excessive spending.
Meanwhile, Tiktok has become perhaps the most pervasive and intrusive media platform of contemporary times, leading to Zach Pennington’s undergraduate thesis at the Ohio State University. Department of Comparative Studies in March 2023, carrying the amusing term, ‘TikTok Capitalism’ as served in his topic on: “TikTok Capitalism: The Attention Economy and the Reproduction of Capitalism”. In the thesis, the student noted among other issues raised, that: while social media platforms broadly have been sites for the reproduction of capitalism, TikTok is both an exacerbation of prior phenomena and the site of new and distinct transformations to capitalism's reproduction. In other words, these popular media platforms have increasingly become tools of capitalist interest, the core of which is the imperative of accumulation. By the way, TikTok is a social media platform created by the technology company “Bytedance” and originally released in a limited international market in 2017. Bytedance is a China-based company that owns a variety of social media platforms, most notably TikTok.
From the foregoing, it should be evident how the modern media platforms have become the key instruments of attention economy with ultimate devotion to capitalism of the digital status. The concept of digital economy ties the essential strands together.
Two sides of the same coin
Forbes magazine has a robust description of the organic link between digital capitalism and attention economy as it averred that: In the attention economy, every second counts. For brands, serving ad content that can hold a viewer’s attention for longer not only leads to greater engagement, enhanced brand recall and improved trust with the consumer, it also positively affects their bottom line. Simply put, more attention means more sales. This makes it key for brands to reevaluate their content and placement strategies in order to cut through the advertising clutter. According to Lumen’s research, as the view time for an advertisement increases, more of these impressions are converted into sales. For example, an ad that was viewed for three seconds was converted to a sale on 50% of occasions. As mentioned, contextual ads proved to be a more effective format in maintaining a viewer’s attention, which means that contextual ads can drive increased sales. This has also been backed up by other studies such as the one conducted by Dentsu. They also used eye-tracking technology to measure how much of an ad had the viewer’s attention. They found that the more pixels of an ad were in view, the more the viewer was paying attention and thus, the more likely they were to buy the product advertised. This further emphasizes the need for brands to perfect their communication strategies and drive memorability. Contextual advertising can play a role in that.
According to the organisers of a Friedrich Ebert Stiftung-sponsored progamme held in 2021, on: “Building Workers’ Power in Digital Capitalism” capital uses digital technology to re-organize the labour process. Thus, what has emerged is communications and information serving as a new underpinning of the ever-changing capitalist political-economic structure. As Xiaoqin Ding and Qiaoyan Chai pointed out in the piece, “The rise of digital capitalism and the social changes it caused: how to develop the digital economy in socialist China”: The second decade of the 21st century has witnessed the spread of cell phones and mobile Internet, the emergence of platforms and IoT, and the evolution of big data and AI. Along with these changes, the digital economy has become a dominator in socioeconomic development, fully demonstrating its remarkable advantages and flaws and bringing an explosive growth of academic attention to digital capitalism and relevant concepts. The duo also highlighted how empirical studies of industries have shown that information networks are permeating all fields in the capitalist economy and culture on an unprecedented scale, turning into an indispensable instrument and momentum for capitalist development, and driving the shift of the political economy towards digital capitalism
In the Chicago Booth Review of September 22, 2022, there appeared a post awkwardly tagged, “Capitalisn’t: Capitalism in Our Attention Economy”, while referencing a book under review, stated as follows: In his new book, The World After Capital, Union Square Ventures managing partner Albert Wenger argues that capitalism cannot allocate all resources efficiently in the digital age—in which the new shortage isn’t capital, but rather human attention. While economically incentivized activities will not go away, he says, we must make room for the things we cannot put a price on. He proposes increasing economic, informational, and psychological freedom to ensure the continuation of human knowledge production. The irony of it all is that we are increasingly living in an “attention economy” rather than an “information economy”. By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all. According to book reviewer, the way in which new instruments for aggregating behavioral data and generating predictions reinforce the dominant position of a coterie of market participants capable of exploiting network effects.
The Forbes Magazine, in its edition of March 23, 2022, carried a column on “The Attention Economy: Standing Out Among The Noise”, penned by Emilia Kirk, it acknowledged that, “as the advertising industry moves towards a cookieless future, brands are presented with an opportunity to optimize their advertising strategy and serve ads that capture the viewer’s attention while also building and maintaining their trust”. Of course, and as confirmed by the Forbes columnist, attention is a finite resource. On average, people are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day. The average human brain is simply incapable of processing such a bombardment of content, which means the vast majority of ads seen are only ignored or forgotten about within seconds. The writer’s message is instructive, to the effect that, as the number of advertisements encountered increases, so has the hostility towards them. According to the U.K. advertising think tank Credos, viewer favorability towards advertising reached a low of 25% in 2019. This has been driven mainly by concerns over consumer privacy, as well as the intrusiveness and irrelevance of the ad content. This changing sentiment, as well as the phasing out of cookies, is obviously of great concern to advertisers. However, many are seeing it as an opportunity to innovate their marketing strategies in order to deliver ad content that engages consumers while gaining and maintaining trust. This is where contextual advertising comes in, pointing to one of the elements that will define the future, at least in the short to medium time frame during which the status quo holds sway.
What the future holds
One guiding reference to bear in mind is that, historically, capitalism has placed premium on profit above general welfare and sustainability. In particular, there is the growth of the phenomenon of ‘military-industrial complex’ which pushes for wars principally in order to sell weapons, the real weapons of mass destruction. The unfolding scenario is well captured by the United Nations Economist Network in their observation: The current model of the attention economy is detrimental to peace, justice and strong institutions, or SDG. It thrives on unlimited online interactions and information overload, often employing citizen’s digital twins without their knowledge and with the aim to affecting their intention. In addition, in countries that do not regulate data use, individuals are often left with little to non-existent power over the entities which manage their digital lives and potentially exploit their attention. On May 18, 2021, Joachim Klement of Research Foundation came up with the interesting remark under the provocative post, “Capitalism for Everyone”, that: Although capitalism has been the most successful economic system in history, it has come under increasing criticism in recent years. To address this growing distrust, the authors advocate reforms to make capitalism more inclusive and accountable, ending on the note that, We are capitalists and believe in the continued power of capitalism to create wealth, but we also see the need for a more inclusive approach to capitalism.
The most pertinent message from all the foregoing is that the exploitative essence of capitalism remains constant even with changes in the specific mode of operation; this is basis for the assertion by Ding and Chai, referenced earlier, to the effect that “while reshaping the form of capitalism, digital capitalism conceals the privatized mode of production in the name of the revolution of economics, hides the sources of surplus-value by holding high technology determinism, disguises exploitation through the value law of equivalent exchange and covers poverty and inequality with capital accumulation.” More worrisome is the war-mongering character and orientation of capitalism as it has now transformed into what is referred to as ‘surveillance capitalism’, given its manifold dangers. Interestingly, there’s indeed a major text, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff, published in 2019. Married to the equation is an ongoing cooperation between Big Tech and the military-industrial complex. As observed by Maximilian Jung in the article, “Digital capitalism is a mine not a cloud- Exploring the extractivism at the root of data economy”, published on the platform of the Transnational Institute’s report on the State of Power 2023: “while the public is (rightly) highly critical of state surveillance, for-profit surveillance often evades such scrutiny”. The real challenge as I see it is how to convert the power of technology from primary service to private interest championed by capitalists into an instrument of liberation through redress of existential handicaps confronted by the mass of the people across both advanced and poor economies, but especially in the latter. In our suggested framework, the flourishing facility for data collection will be increasingly used to serve rather than abused for domination of fellow humans accompanied by environmental destruction. I come in peace, please.
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