Re: <eyebeam><blast> Art and the attention economy

[d.palmer@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au (Daniel Palmer)]

>I see the  Internet as
>the setting of a new kind of an economy, a post-material one.

Michael: an interesting thesis on attention, but what do you mean by a
post-material economy???  Quite aside from all the material structures
supportig the various nets in which we find ourselves imbricated -inc.
the Internet- surely even the most posthuman bodies within them are
throughly and utterly *material*?

>In this new economy, where attention is wealth, having attention is
>having a kind of possession or property.

Attention is not wealth.  Attention is only valuable as a process of
temporarily commanding viewers/consumers' focus on an object (art or
commodity) and thereby investing that *object* with value (in a speedy
world of commodified time).  As Robert and Ben indicated, the logic of
advertising has to be the model here.

Sorry to draw attention away from 'art', but IMHO considering the
Internet post-material serves not only to confuse, but is in principle
dangerous [and this relates to all the earlier contributions about
embodiment from the likes of K. Hayles and M. Morse].

Regards,
Daniel

Daniel Palmer
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Department of English with Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne
Parkville  VIC  3052
AUSTRALIA
ph.: 61-3-9347-5804
fax: 61-3-9344-5494
email: d.palmer@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
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