The concept of the attention economy has enjoyed a remarkable career since Georg Franck (1989), Michael Goldhaber (1997), and Thomas Davenport and John Beck (2000, 2001) first advanced the thesis that, in the age of the internet, money was being supplanted by a new currency governed by different rules. In recent decades, the term has been widely invoked to explain a broad range of social phenomena—from the rise of right-wing populism to increasing societal polar­ization—by appealing to an alleged natural law that deter­mines how attention circulates in digital and social media. Yet the notion of an atten­tion economy has rarely been subjected to sustained critical or methodo­logical scrutiny. This paper seeks to recon­struct and interrogate the theoretical founda­tions of the attention-economy paradigm and to propose an alter­native approach to concep­tualizing the social problem of the unequal distri­bution of attention.

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Werber, Niels (2026): „Attention Economy. Die Verteilung von Beachtung“, in: Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitung 1 (Jubiläumsheft), S. 52–79. DOI: https://doi.org/10.28937/9783787351718_6.