An Immanent Critique of the Attention Economy.

The present article develops an immanent critique of the attention economy as a power apparatus. In particular, it contends that what Foucault (2009) defined as the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of security entails a transformation of the main function of human attention: whereas in disciplinary societies attention (or the gaze) was aimed at imposing continuous surveillance on each individual, societies of security conceive the gaze of each subject as a source of data which allows constructing a new object of power, i.e., the population. To illustrate this, the present article focuses on the specific case of the attention economy and the notions of ‘dataveillance’ and ‘Big Data’.The present article develops an immanent critique of the attention economy as a power apparatus. In particular, it contends that what Foucault (2009) defined as the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of security entails a transformation of the main function of human attention: whereas in disciplinary societies attention (or the gaze) was aimed at imposing continuous surveillance on each individual, societies of security conceive the gaze of each subject as a source of data which allows constructing a new object of power, i.e., the population. To illustrate this, the present article focuses on the specific case of the attention economy and the notions of ‘dataveillance’ and ‘Big Data’.The present article develops an immanent critique of the attention economy as a power apparatus. In particular, it contends that what Foucault (2009) defined as the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of security entails a transformation of the main function of human attention: whereas in disciplinary societies attention (or the gaze) was aimed at imposing continuous surveillance on each individual, societies of security conceive the gaze of each subject as a source of data which allows constructing a new object of power, i.e., the population. To illustrate this, the present article focuses on the specific case of the attention economy and the notions of ‘dataveillance’ and ‘Big Data’