Dans le cadre de la série de conférences “Communication in the era of attention scarcity” à The American University of Paris , Ahmed Bounfour intervient le 6 octobre comme commentateur du papier de Georg Franck (Vienna University of Technology) sur « The Economy of attention in the Age of Neoliberalism ».
In the context of the economy of attention, media are information markets. The distinctive feature of old and new media, accordingly, is a business model rather than a technological base. Old media are those information markets where information continues to be exchanged for money, new media those which have left the exchange of information for money behind only to attract attention. The business model of new media relies on selling the service of attraction to the advertising industry. This paper points out the parallelism between the rise of the new media and the ascent of financial industries. Both these developments were triggered by the neoliberal agenda of deregulation and have resulted in a sphere of unleashed capitalism removed from the “real” economy. In both culture and finance the neophyte forms of capitalism prove to be superior in profits and dynamics. In both money and attention capitalism we have to deal with a new class of rich. In the economy of attention the new class are the celebrities whose wealth of attention is activated as a capital yielding interest in terms of attention income. The paper investigates the question of how celebrity culture could grow into the paradigm of advertisement financed media culture.