The Attention Economy Between Market Capturing and Commitment in the Polity

This article describes a participatory form of the attention economy, as opposed to another form, the market attention economy. The latter signifies an evolution of the market environment, characterized by an overabundance of information at a cost that is quasi nil. In this context, attention becomes rare. The participatory attention economy accounts for the actors' motives for engaging in social life, mainly through social media on the Internet, in a context where attention has become rare. Drawing on the work of pioneer authors who have studied the attention economy, I show that in its participatory form it can be described as a polity in the making, in the sense of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot. This means that it embodies a set of collective rules and a specific principle of justice governing behaviours in the polity. I describe the normative characteristics of this emerging polity and compare it to the market form of the attention economy. This enables me to shed light on three contemporary problems in economic sociology and public policy making.