In 1983, Time magazine ran a cover story called “The New Economy,” in which economists and social thinkers posited that America’s transition from a heavily industrial economy to a technology-based economy would lead to an entirely new kind of marketplace. This new economy was at its most baffling and unknown in the late 1990s, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, when we witnessed an entirely new meltdown of this entirely new type of economy. Today, we find ourselves in yet another new economy, one with a plurality of actors, values, and marketplaces, a plurality facilitated by the ubiquity of the Internet. These are the new economies of the Web.
I am pleased to be presiding over “The New Economies of the Web,” an open paper session at the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference on April 9th. Here, we present three scholars who theorize the nuances of these new economies, and in so doing, allow social science to take important steps toward understanding the contours of this new and largely uncharted territory.
Ashlee Humphreys, “The Construction of Value in Attention Economies”
On Wednesday night, Zach, also known as YorkieVids , posted a simple video of his dog for friends to see. On Thursday morning he woke up to find 620 emails in his inbox, all raving about his video and eagerly expecting more. Within a few months, his video had garnered 1,602,053 views, 2,149 comments and was rated by 5,576 people, with an average rating of 4.48 out of 5 stars. Over the next year, Zach gained 3,647 subscribers who now follow his videos on a regular basis, offering encouraging comments and enthusiastic support. How did Zach’s video go from a throwaway to a phenomenon? What about it attracted the attention of over a million viewers and how did this change Zach’s idea of what he was doing? What caused people to stay with him, following his next dog “masterpieces”? The goal of this article is to answer these questions using the framework of attention economy.
This paper investigates the process of value creation in an attention economy. Previous research has enumerated the broad dynamics of an attention economy, but has not theorized the micro-interactional relationships that lead to value creation. To understand how people view themselves within attention exchange systems, we interviewed users of YouTube, an internet community where people exchange videos, post comments, and maintain personal profiles. Several sets of materials from the site were collected including interviews, user comments, profile contents, and the videos themselves. Thirty-one interviews were conducted, 15 in situ over the internet via private messages (Giesler 2006; Kozinets 2002), 15 face-to-face, and one phone interview. Interviews lasted about an hour and a half, on average, and solicited information about the informant’s interactions with other users on the site, and their opinions on the videos they watched or created, and the process of watching or creating these videos.
In general, we find that value is created through interactions between several user-created roles—fans and celebrities, viewers and producers. We document the evolution of these roles as the exchange network develops and as social and cultural capital is accumulated. This process has several implications for conceptualizing online exchange. First, people construct their role in relation to other people in the exchange in systematic ways. They will, for example, think of themselves as a ‘passive viewer’ in contrast to more active fans in the community or a viewer in contrast to a producer. These identities change systematically both temporally within the exchange itself and between exchanges in the system. A user may be a celebrity in one exchange, but then identify as a fan in the next exchange. Yet this identification is only one part of the social role. That is, users form a sense of identity and then find it confirmed or disconfirmed in interactions with others in the role set (Cooley 1902; Mead 1934).
Previous theories of fans and celebrities have studied contexts in which the fan or celebrity has a relatively fixed identity as a fan or as a celebrity (Dyer 1979; Gamson 1994; Jenkins 1992). In an increasingly democratized media-marketplace, however, these lines are blurred as common folk become celebrities via reality TV and celebrities become fans of their favorite designers or brands. Similarly, in cases where the means of production (especially media production) are widely available, people increasingly negotiate identity shifts between producers and consumers.
Second, value is created through the accumulation of fan feedback via a four stage process. Previous work on attention economies has extensively investigated the historical changes that have led to the commodification of attention, but have not examined the micro-interactional process that leads to value creation itself. By examining celebrity production, fan response, and the institutional, archival mechanisms that enable reification of value, this article has laid out a model for the production of value in an attention economy.
Third, by studying this sharing system, we gain insight into the factors that motivate people to share (Belk 2009). Previous books on the attention economy have stressed the convertibility of attention to money, but neglected the barter system of attention exchange that may be more prevalent, and more meaningful. In an exchange system like YouTube, people regularly exchange attention. These exchanges build attention capital or what we might more colloquially call celebrity status. The exchange of comments, as currency repays sharers for their work and motivates them to produce again. Further, these comments form a more reified indicator of value when they are used as metrics for measuring celebrity/producer value. In this sense, they truly are the capital on which this non-monetary exchange system functions.
Han-Teng Liao, “Keyword Economy of the Web: Seeking Order in Open Linguistic Materials”
Though the general trend of digital and computer network development is faster and bigger in content production and circulation, not all languages suffer from the problem of overabundance like English. Thus, before one can theorize about information or attention in the Web environment, this essay proposes a theoretical framework that highlights the socio- and computational- linguistic dimension of the World-Wide Web: keyword economy. By “economy” I mean the metric system that is first defined by the concept of “relevance” in the study of information retrieval and information science and then implemented by modern search engines to provide users with relevant search results in a very short time. Thus, in such an economy, both the concept and experience of “relevance” is based on the heuristics of matching linguistic symbols and calculating hyperlinks connections, so that the vast amount of documents can be first indexed by a list of linguistic tokens and then differentiated based on the search keywords input by users. The essay proposes that it is the order of relevance, albeit artificially constructed over the open linguistic materials, that become the scarce resource of keyword economy that shapes the perceived quality (and thus usually monetary and/or symbolic value) of information and provides the underlying incentives for Web content generation, especially to those who desire to define certain keywords. The essay concludes with several cultural, political and economic implications with the proposed theory of the Web as a keyword economy, as opposed to the more popular concepts as information economy or attention economy.
The first implication is relevant to the debate of the Internet vs. the multiple Internets. If the Web and other Internet applications are seen as parts of the keyword economy, then it is language-specific, albeit not always domain specific, simply because of the underlying socio- and computational- linguistic calculation metrics. Thus when US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claims that “there isn’t an economic internet and a social internet and a political internet; there’s just the internet”, it is partly true. For example, the global oil company BP buys the keyword of “oil spill” and the anti-Semitic website Jew Watch dominates several search results on the keyword “Jew”. The economic, social and political can converge on a word or phrase. However, there is probably an English-written internet and a Chinese-written internet and a Hindi-written internet because BP has to buy the Chinese keywords of “oil spill” and Jew Watch’s dominance of search results are limited to English-written search engines and search keywords. Thus, using the concept of keyword economy, as opposed to information economy or attention economy, can highlight the role of the capacity of digital and computer networks to match and calculate symbolic materials for internet development. Another important implication is the potential cultural, political and economic mobilization around certain keywords to form a voice for collective action, with also corresponding issues such as language planning, content censorship and content farms. Since the role of language has been crucial in running a state, creating a market and fostering civic societies, it is necessary to re-examines the potential power of keyword economy for changing the status quo, or the existing institutions and their ways of managing linguistic materials. Finally, by seeing the Web as a “keyword economy” where economy, in the classic political economic sense, means a set of calculus to govern and manage scarce resource, this essay argues that, between the raw linguistic materials and user input search terms, the calculus and data of “relevance” is constructed as scarce resource, where information can be ranked and attention be distributed. Hence, the prerequisite for an information economy or an attention economy may be a keyword economy that constructs the concept and experience of “relevance” for both the content generation and search keywords for a certain language, which may or may not be bounded by national or geographic borders.
Piergiorgio Degli Esposti (@pgde), “Information overload and size paradox”
Information overload, spam, advertisement, dataflow, tweets and wikipedia are a part of our lives, whether or not it’s wanted. One of the main characteristics of the web today is the dematerialization of space as we know it; the amount of data flow is at a constant increase and cloud computing is giving everyone with internet access the opportunity to obtain this infinite archive of data. Within the data floating around on every platform, there is very little valuable information. Some theoretical approaches to understanding navigating the internet are keen to the notion of a paradigm switch, in which it is a shared opportunity offered by digital technologies and social web platforms that is more and more valued (Anderson, Lessig, Jenkins). Relating to the task at hand when using the internet to research information are many big-time companies such as the top search engines (Google, Yahoo) and social network sites (Facebook) that are earning profits by filtering the vast amount of data flow for the user, and setting them onto a pre-planned path, acting like digital “weinees” (Ritzer).
According to Kelly (2008), the internet acts like a global copy machine that constantly reproduces, organizes and relays information. Some of the information flow becomes transformed into platforms that can be controlled by the owner of the content. Other information simply just flows and rebounds off of each other every which way becoming noise for the system so that users are consequently not able to decode it; in other words, it becomes digital garbage. This cognitive surplus (Shirky) gives the possibility of there being unqualified users, blurring the differences between professionals and amateurs, but at the same time the centrality switch offered by web 2.0, from efficiency to effectiveness (Ritzer, Jurghenson) generates an overlap in the production process, and even if data weight can be considered visible, the overlap in the significance process is of great analytical relevance.
Society and markets have never before experienced an era with so much information entirely mediated by a self-upgrading artificial structure that learns from user history through searches and tendencies. The bulimia effect that it causes reflects what is happening in real world consumption. The phrase “bigger is better” models the limits in the material world and culture. The mega structures of the web platforms are becoming more and more like “dinosaurs of consumption” (Ritzer). Continued access to an infinite amount of irrelevant data is almost like an act of desperation as many mega web platforms head towards failure, giving the feeling that their hype is ending for a particular platform while keeping intact their position as a “digital dinosaur.” Boyd talks about Second Life, a digital cemetery, a platform in which all the informational value created by the user’s activity is vanishing away, thus overturning the platform into a huge data disposal.
Speed is a key factor in this process of burning value and information that has become typical of the digital age, but isn’t it true that the faster something grows, the faster it will disappear? Is informational value related more to it’s “just in time tweet,” i.e., the timing of the information, rather than for its content? Is the internet as it is today an empowering tool for humanity or is it just building a data pit which uses the system to discern valuable information from digital garbage? How can we deal with the paradox between empowerment and exploitation proposed by contemporary informational systems? Is digital bureaucracy, a global social class that owns cultural, economical and social capital, growing from the contemporary media environment? What is its collective ethos? These are the main questions that society will have to confront.