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G. Franck:
"Vanity Fairs. Another View of the Economy of Attention";
in: "Vanity Fairs. Another View of the Economy of Attention", Springer Nature, Cham Switzerland, 2020, ISBN: 978-3-030-41531-0, 1 - 132.

Vanity is an intriguing motive for competition. Whether you take it to mean excessive self-regard or just craving for attention, it denotes a drive that is both strongly self-centred and eminently social. It is self-centred since it is, in the last analysis, pursuit of self-esteem; it is eminently social since the self-esteem we can afford depends on our income of appreciative attention. The pursuit of self-esteem thus includes that one has to compete for attention. Vanity fairs are socially organised competitions for attention.

Competition for attention is no one-way affair. You have to offer something if you want do be paid attention. This means that the organisation of vanity fairs can be functional regarding the generation of some sort of supply. Vanity fairs thus wait to be utilized by society as exchange systems where goods and services are exchanged for attention instead of money. Since the pursuit of self-esteem is both tending to high standards and highly capable in mobilising energy, vanity fairs wait to be utilized by society as markets for particularly challenging demands.

Starting with an account of the interface that connects the social economy of attention with the intra-psychic economy of self-esteem, this essay goes into two cases in point: modern science and post-modern media culture. Both scientific communication and the dominant media today are information markets where information, instead of being sold for money, is directly exchanged for attention. Scientists working for publication work for the `wage of fame´, the business model of so-called new media is to supply information services free of charge only to attract attention, i.e. to produce a service to be sold to the advertising industry. In both cases the use of attention as a means of payment is key to a phenomenal success. Science and advertisement financed media lie at the base of contemporary culture in economically advanced societies.

The concomitant of the success is a thorough rationalisation of the economy of attention. This economy, having practiced until not so long ago as a barter of interpersonal exchange, has grown into a full-fledged capitalist economy. Wealth of attention - in the forms of reputation, prestige, prominence, fame - has proved capable of being activated as a capital, i.e. as an interest yielding asset. Thorough rationalisation of the economy of attention has resulted in mental capitalism whose upshot is celebrity culture.

Capitalist economies are infamous for inequality and ecological problems. Mental capitalism is no exception to the rule. The new form of rioting against unequal distribution of public attention is the now so popular anger against the elites. This riot sweeps through the social media, the latest innovation of advertisement financed media. With social media, emotionalized hypes and in particular, negative emotions spread as freely as climate pollutants. We face an emotional climate change, a warm-up of the mental sphere.

Emotional pollution is the dark side of the success story of vanity fairs. It is what an ethics tailored for vanity fairs has to deal with. The essay closes with conceptualising a secular ethics that does not decry the craving for attention, but suggests to utilize the caring it involves about the role one´s person plays in foreign consciousness for bridging the motivational gap between the individual pursuit of interest and the promotion of the common good.

new media, competition in the service of self esteem, scientific economy of attention, emotional climate change, ethics

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41532-7

Springer