812111

research-article2018
JOS0010.1177/1440783318812111Journal of SociologyKrieken

Article
Journal of Sociology

Georg Franck’s ‘The Economy

2019, Vol. 55(1) 3­–7
© The Author(s) 2018
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of Attention’: Mental capitalism sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1440783318812111
https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783318812111
and the struggle for attention journals.sagepub.com/home/jos

Robert van Krieken

University of Sydney, Australia

Abstract
This article places Georg Franck’s ‘The Economy of Attention’ in the context of the broader
discussions of ‘the attention economy’, and the increasing significance of attention in a knowledge
society characterised by ever-increasing flows of information and data. I highlight the four core
elements of Franck’s theory of the economy of attention: first, the importance of the fundamental
human desire for attention; second, his emphasis on the parallels between attention and money,
making it more literally a form of capital than is usually assumed; third, the self-reproducing
character of attention capital, earning interest just as money does; fourth, the connections
between the economy of attention and the expanding impetus towards everyone becoming a
celebrity and a ‘brand’ within what he calls ‘mental capitalism’, with the field of academic labour
a key example.

Keywords
academic labour, branding, celebrity, economy of attention, mental capitalism

Since the emergence of the internet and the spread of social media, it has become clear
that the structure and dynamics of the flow of information, knowledge and ideas has been
radically transformed, to the extent that it now makes sense to speak of a ‘new structural
transformation of the public sphere’, as dramatic a change in the role of media in society
as the shifts in the late 19th century identified by Habermas (1989).1 Apart from the
overall decentring of information and knowledge, a striking feature of the current period
is the capacity of a wide spectrum of figures ranging from Donald Trump to a panoply of
self-branders, micro celebrities (Senft, 2013), social media ‘influencers’ and the
‘Instafamous’ (Marwick, 2015), to convert their existing public profile – in fact their
celebrity – into various types of economic, cultural, social and political capital.

Corresponding author:
Robert van Krieken, University of Sydney, Sydney 2006, Australia.
Email: robert.van.krieken@sydney.edu.au
4 Journal of Sociology 55(1)

Recently the outgoing Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Sout­

phommasane, observed that part of the explanation for a turn to race politics in public
debate should include the apparent monetisation of racism. ‘Faced with competition
from a proliferation of news and entertainment sources,’ said Soutphommasane, ‘some
media outlets are using racial controversies to grab attention – as a means of clinging on
to their audiences’ (Grattan, 2018). In fact, this is a point that also applies much more
broadly to the emergence of populist politicians leveraging their celebrity ‘attention cap-
ital’ to engage their audiences, indicating the close embrace between the mass media and
the permanent disruption of public debate with ‘dangerous ideas’, a concept that the
Right has so vigorously and successfully appropriated from the Left. The important para-
dox in Donald Trump’s denunciation of the mass media as ‘the enemy of people’, for
example, is that he has in fact helped rescue them financially.
Terms like ‘the attention economy’, and ‘the economics of attention’ have become
increasingly popular in analysing these shifts and transformation since the mid-1990s,
when writers such as Michael Goldhaber (1997) and Thomas Davenport and John Beck
(2000, 2001) began popularising these concepts. However, their analyses do not delve
very deeply, the concept of ‘the attention economy’ remains under-theorised, and the
broader significance of the concept ‘attention’ can more usefully be outlined by examin-
ing the work of a number of other writers. For example, drawing on his expertise in rela-
tion to the history of rhetoric and linguistic style, Richard Lanham (1997, 2006) develops
an account of the economics of attention with reference to artists such as Marcel Duchamp
and Andy Warhol, drawing on a point made by Herbert Simon in 1971 about the scarcity
of attention in an information-rich world:

in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a

scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather
obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance
of information sources that might consume it. (Simon, 1971: 40–1)

Lanham suggests that one can trace a changing of places between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’,
or between ‘stuff’ and ‘fluff’, paralleling in many respects the arguments concerning
hyperreality (Eco, 1986) and the simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994; Deleuze, 1983).
Equally important, however, are the contributions of the Austrian philosopher, archi-
tect and urban planner at the Vienna Technical University, Georg Franck, who started
developing one of the more nuanced and penetrating theories of the economy of attention
in 1989, and has since continued to develop his analysis of celebrity and ‘mental capital-
ism’, often focusing on the realm of science and academic reputation.2 Since his work
either remains untranslated or appears in relatively obscure outlets, his path-breaking
analyses, as Yves Citton has recently observed, ‘remain unjustly unknown’ (2017: 45)
outside the German-language discussions. The essay translated here, ‘Ökonomie der
Aufmerksamkeit’, was first published in German in 1993 (Franck, 1993), and although it
was translated into English by Silvia Plaza (Franck, 1999a), the outlet is relatively obscure
and not very accessible, and the translation was in need of various corrections. That article
was followed by a book-length version in 1998 (Franck, 1998), and further elaborated in
a number of later publications (Franck, 1999b, 2002, 2005, 2011, 2014, 2016).
Krieken 5

Franck’s theory of the economy of attention makes a number of important and distinc-
tive points about the relationship between information, the mass media and society, as
well as the underlying logic driving the production of media content in general and
celebrity of various sorts in particular. Very briefly, his approach to the economy of atten-
tion has the following core components.
First, Franck agrees with Simon’s point that an abundance of information, knowledge
and data makes attention the scarce resource (1998: 49–50), but he also places equal
emphasis on the desire for attention as a basic human need. Franck sees all social life as
a ‘struggle for attention’, and celebrity as the outcome of the way the mass media engage
with that struggle. The commercial activity seeking to turn production into consumption,
‘riding’ that basic human need, especially and as frequently as possible by amplifying it
through the mass media, produces celebrity as a focal point for the social organisation of
attention. This is why he says that ‘[E]verything which is promoted, published and culti-
vated by the media is, by definition, celebrity’ (Franck, 1993: 749).
Second, he emphasises that attention and money are more like each other than one would
normally assume, given the relatively loose way in which most commentaries tend to use the
term ‘capital’. He argues that a central weakness of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘capital’,
in social capital and cultural capital, is that it does not in fact refer to a measurable intangible
income, but only to a means of securing the surplus value of social distinction (Franck,
2011: 113–14). Attention, argues Franck in contrast, becomes a currency when it becomes,
like money, abstract, comparable, a system of equivalence, quantifiable and measurable in
the form of circulation figures, audience ratings, sales figures, hits, likes, views, downloads,
followers and so on (2005: 103). The measurement of attention does not simply reflect a
quantity of attention capital: the quantifications become part of the attention capital: so the
number of followers of a Facebook page or the number of views of a YouTube video in
themselves increase their attention value. As Franck put it: ‘[T]he solution to the riddle of
the miraculous increase in celebrity lies in the media’s ability to collect and deliver the criti-
cal quantities needed to run the gathering of attention as a mass business’ (1993: 749).
Third, the fact that attention capital operates much like money has a wide range of
implications. Just like money, attention earns interest, it is self-reproducing; being a celeb-
rity is sufficient to earn an income of attention capital. There is a circular, self-reinforcing
and self-reproducing dynamic: attention generates more attention. Paying attention to an
attention-rich public figure, a celebrity, is in turn a means of attracting attention (to one-
self). This is an essential component of how Twitter and Facebook function. One can
observe second-order attention wealth-creation: the attention of those rich in received
attention is ‘worth’ correspondingly more. This means that in the economy of attention the
mass media function in the same way as banks and stock exchanges in the money economy
(Franck, 2011: 116, 118–20). As Franck puts it, ‘the media, within the attention economy,
are what the financial sector is in money capitalism’ (2005: 107), and the mass media and
social media are the ‘stock exchange of attention capital’. Banks drive contemporary capi-
talist economies with an ever-expanding supply of money and, likewise, ‘the media are
supplying expanding information markets with growing amounts of attention’ (2005: 107).
Finally, the effects of this ‘mental capitalism’ include a never-ending requirement for
individuals to make themselves as much of a celebrity as possible, since the competitive
dynamics of the attention economy are constantly ramping up, and more and more cultural
production is orientated solely to capturing attention (Franck, 2011: 113). ‘Consumption’,
6 Journal of Sociology 55(1)

writes Franck, ‘has shifted from products to brands’ (2005: 99), and this means that every-
thing and everyone becomes a brand, and social and political efficacy is about how good
and well known the brand is. The distribution of attention in turn produces a new form of
social inequality, between those who receive a surplus of attention (celebrities of all sorts),
and those with a deficit (non-celebrities): ‘The kind of exploitation peculiar to mental capi-
talism is that of the many who always pay attention, but to whom little attention is paid’
(2005: 112, translation corrected). This in turn explains the seductive power of social
media, which engage with this ongoing and ever-intensifying struggle for attention.
For Franck, an excellent example of how attention capital operates is precisely what
the readers of this journal do every day, the work of science and scholarship (Franck,
2014, 2016). The value of academic work is measured to a large extent – today perhaps
entirely – by the amount of attention it receives: the citation rate of the journal in which
an article is published, the number of citations the article itself receives, the status of the
book’s publisher, and how well known the book’s reviewers are. Franck argues that cita-
tion is essentially a fee in attention capital paid for the licence to use the cited author’s
information and ideas (Franck, 1999b: 54). Because academics are always competing in
a densely populated market in which no one has time to read everything, there is a strong
motivation to capture the attention of one’s intended readership with all the ploys of
celebrity production – the catchy title and cover, the attention-grabbing event, the radical
re-think of all that has been written before, the provocative stance and, of course, the
association with an established scholarly celebrity, either by making them the topic – by
writing still more articles and books on Weber, Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Derrida
and so on – or with a foreword or laudatory recommendation on the back cover. In the
age of social media, this space has expanded enormously to include blog posts, Tweets,
Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest mentions.3 In this sense, academic life is a
key example of the fundamental logic of ‘celebrification’, and Franck’s article is a sig-
nificant contribution to our understanding of the nuances of that logic (see also my dis-
cussion of attention as ‘celebrity’s secret’: van Krieken, 2018).

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. This discussion draws on parts of my forthcoming book Celebrity Society: The Struggle for
Attention (2nd edn), published by Routledge, with thanks to Routledge for their permission.
2. His publications can be found at: http://www.iemar.tuwien.ac.at/?page_id=374 and here:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Georg_Franck/contributions
3. See, for example, the service provided by Altmetric: https://www.altmetric.com/, offering to
‘monitor … for mentions of research outputs to bring you the most relevant and up to date
picture of the online activity and discussion’. Thanks to Steve Matthewman for drawing my
attention to Altmetric.

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Krieken 7

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Author Biography
Robert van Krieken is a professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, visiting professor of
Sociology at University College Dublin, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in
Australia. His research interests include the sociology of organisations, law, criminology, child-
hood, processes of civilisation and decivilisation, cultural genocide, and the history and sociology
of celebrity, as well as contributing to the theoretical debates around the work of Elias, Foucault,
Luhmann and Latour. The second of edition of his book Celebrity Society: The Struggle for
Attention, is due in early 2019.