Measuring Competition in the Attention Economy: Evidence from Social Media

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Aridor
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Attention Economy

Prospecting Facebook: the limits of the economy of attention

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-346
Author(s):  
Greg Elmer
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Attention Economy

This article questions the utility and universality of the attention economy framework in social media studies, specifically as a critique for dominant industry players such as Facebook. The article proposes a speculative theory of political economy, looking to Facebook’s prospectus as a key document and step in the process of social media financialization.

Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 3161-3182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yini Zhang ◽  
Chris Wells ◽  
Song Wang ◽  
Karl Rohe
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Spectral Clustering ◽  
Citizen Action ◽  
Media System ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
News Value ◽  
Network Similarity ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Mainstream Press

Building on studies of the hybrid media system and attention economy, we develop the concept of amplification to explore how the activities of social media–based publics may enlarge the attention paid to a given person or message. We apply the concept to the 2016 US election, asking who constituted Donald Trump’s enormous Twitter following and how that following contributed to his success at attracting attention, including from the mainstream press. Using spectral clustering based on social network similarity, we identify key publics that constituted Trump’s Twitter following and demonstrate how particular publics amplified his social media presence in different ways. Our discussion raises questions about how algorithms “read” metrics to guide content on social media platforms, how journalists draw on social media metrics in their determinations of news value and worthiness, and how the process of amplification relates to possibilities of citizen action through digital communication.

scholarly journals Twitter, Presidential Debates and Attention Economy: A Symbiosis between Television Audience and Social Media Users during Campaign Season

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Pedro Santander ◽  
Claudio Elórtegui ◽  
Camila Buzzo
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Volumetric Analysis ◽  
Mobile Platforms ◽  
User Interest ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Presidential Debates ◽  
User Interactions ◽  
Presidential Candidates ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Television Audience

The year 2017 was an intense electoral year in Chile, both parliamentary and presidential. In this context, by using computer intelligence, an interdisciplinary team conducted a collection and volumetric analysis of over 3 million Twitter messages belonging to users that mentioned, at least once, any of the presidential candidates, both in the first and second voting round. Our goal was focused on analyzing the relationship between traditional media (radio and television) and Twitter, probing user interactions during the broadcast of live political shows, with emphasis on presidential debates. For this purpose, we carried out a volumetric analysis of all mentions in social media during the broadcast of live political shows to characterize the digital attention of the audience, under different parameters. Our results show that there is high user interest in the digital debate regarding presidential debates, a positive correlation between traditional media and Twitter during the broadcast of live political shows, and that, also, the latter trigger social media; furthermore, we verify the double screen phenomenon made possible by mobile platforms.

scholarly journals Raging Against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 28-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Myers West
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Information Flows ◽  
Individual User ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Asymmetrical Power ◽  
Moderation Process

Social media platforms act as networked gatekeepers—by ranking, channeling, promoting, censoring, and deleting content they hold power to facilitate or hinder information flows. One of the mechanisms they use is content moderation, or the enforcement of which content is allowed or disallowed on the platform. Though content moderation relies on users’ labor to identify content to delete, users have little capacity to influence content policies or enforcement. Despite this, some social media users are turning to collective action campaigns, redirecting information flows by subverting the activities of moderators, raising the visibility of otherwise hidden moderation practices, and organizing constituencies in opposition to content policies. Drawing on the example of the campaign to change Facebook’s nudity policy, this paper examines the strategies and tactics of users turning to collective action, considering which factors are most influential in determining the success or failure of a campaign. It finds that network gatekeeping salience is a good model for assessing which collective action efforts are most likely to be effective in achieving individual user goals. This indicates that the users who are already most able to harness the attention economy of social media platforms are more likely to successfully navigate the content moderation process. The analysis concludes by attending to what users might learn from the dynamics of network gatekeeping as they seek to resist the asymmetrical power relations of platforms.

scholarly journals #familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511770719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Abidin
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Filler Content ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Digital Labor ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Or Practice

Following in the celebrity trajectory of mommy bloggers, global micro-microcelebrities, and reality TV families, family Influencers on social media are one genre of microcelebrity for whom the “anchor” content in which they demonstrate their creative talents, such as producing musical covers or comedy sketches, is a highly profitable endeavor. Yet, this commerce is sustained by an undercurrent of “filler” content wherein everyday routines of domestic life are shared with followers as a form of “calibrated amateurism.” Calibrated amateurism is a practice and aesthetic in which actors in an attention economy labor specifically over crafting contrived authenticity that portrays the raw aesthetic of an amateur, whether or not they really are amateurs by status or practice, by relying on the performance ecology of appropriate platforms, affordances, tools, cultural vernacular, and social capital. In this article, I consider the anatomy of calibrated amateurism, and how this practice relates to follower engagement and responses. While some follower responses have highlighted concerns over the children’s well-being, a vast majority overtly signal their love, support, and even envy toward such parenting. I draw on ethnographically informed content analysis of two group of family Influencers on social media to illustrate the enactment and value of calibrated amateurism in an increasingly saturated ecology and, investigate how such parents justify the digital labor in which their children partake to produce viable narratives of domestic life.

scholarly journals Social Media and the Emergence, Establishment and Transformation of the Right-Wing Populist Finns Party

Populism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-139
Author(s):  
Tuukka Ylä-Anttila
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
The Right ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Inside Out

Abstract This paper assesses the significance of social media for the Finns Party and the related anti-immigration movement from 2007 to the present day, in light of theories on the relationship of populism and social media. These include people-centrism, disenfranchisement, homophily, the attention economy, media elitism, and (lack of) communicative resources. Tracing the historical trajectory of the Finnish anti-immigration movement and the Finns Party, I argue that the Finnish case is an example of a movement being born online and using social media to build a political identity and strategically gain influence through a party, eventually transforming it from the inside out—rather than the party strategically using social media for its purposes, as is sometimes assumed in party-centric literature. While acknowledging the continued importance of parties, research on contemporary populist movements must take into account the political engagement of citizens facilitated by online media.

Heterotopian selfies: how social media destabilizes brand assemblages

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (9/10) ◽  
pp. 1789-1813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joonas Rokka ◽  
Robin Canniford
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Brand Management ◽  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose Digital technologies are changing the ways in which the meanings and identity of both consumers and brands are constructed. This research aims to extend knowledge of how consumer-made “selfie” images shared in social media might contribute to the destabilization of brands as assemblages. Design/methodology/approach Insights are drawn from a critical visual content analysis of three popular champagne brand accounts and consumer-made selfies featuring these brands in Instagram. Findings This study shows how brands and branded selves intersect through “heterotopian selfie practices”. Accentuated by the rise of attention economy and “consumer microcelebrity”, the authors argue that these proliferating selfie images can destabilize spatial, temporal, symbolic and material properties of brand assemblages. Practical implications The implications include a consideration of how selfie practices engender new challenges for brand design and brand management. Originality/value This study illustrates how a brand assemblage approach can guide investigations of brands at multiple scales of analysis. In particular, this paper extends knowledge of visual brand-related user-generated content in terms of how consumers express, visualize and share selfies and how the heterotopian quality of this sharing consequently shapes brand assemblages.

scholarly journals The Network Visibility Problem

2022 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Khashayar Gatmiry ◽  
Manuel Gomez-Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Greedy Algorithm ◽  
Real Data ◽  
Recommendation Algorithm ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
Set Function ◽  
Link Recommendation ◽  
The Greedy Algorithm

Social media is an attention economy where broadcasters are constantly competing for attention in their followers’ feeds. Broadcasters are likely to elicit greater attention from their followers if their posts remain visible at the top of their followers’ feeds for a longer period of time. However, this depends on the rate at which their followers receive information in their feeds, which in turn depends on the broadcasters they follow. Motivated by this observation and recent calls for fairness of exposure in social networks, in this article, we look at the task of recommending links from the perspective of visibility optimization. Given a set of candidate links provided by a link recommendation algorithm, our goal is to find a subset of those links that would provide the highest visibility to a set of broadcasters. To this end, we first show that this problem reduces to maximizing a nonsubmodular nondecreasing set function under matroid constraints. Then, we show that the set function satisfies a notion of approximate submodularity that allows the standard greedy algorithm to enjoy theoretical guarantees. Experiments on both synthetic and real data gathered from Twitter show that the greedy algorithm is able to consistently outperform several competitive baselines.

Illusions of Empowerment

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Weisgerber
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Digital Democracy ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Systems

This article calls into question the social media empowerment narrative and the underlying idea that social media platforms are empowering everyday netizens to have their voices heard. The author argues that social media technologies may simply privilege only those Internet users who are new media savvy and have leisure time to participate in the so-called digital democracy. While social media systems might have lowered the entrance threshold for civic engagement, hurdles such as the growing competition in an attention economy, the odds of standing out amidst millions of other individual voices, knowledge of new media technologies required to achieve visibility, and time demands make the social media empowerment vision more difficult to attain than the architects of the empowerment ideology have made the public to believe.

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