Boullier D. (2024), » The Drift of Attention Regimes in the Age of Digital Platforms. When Curiosity Was Taken Over by Reputation » in Enrico Campo and Yves Citton, The Politics of Curiosity. Alternatives to the Attention Economy,London, Routledge, Chapter 7.
The genealogy of contemporary attention regimes needs to mobilize a mediology to show how attentional infrastructures have been profoundly altered in two decades (from 2000 to 2020). If the regime of alertness has come to dominate the entire business model of digital platforms, it took some time to emerge. When web surfing, serendipity, blogs, and peer to peer were the rule, curiosity had its place, at the price of a form of disorientation and a rather costly collective self-help effort. As soon as the commercial web took over from 1995 onwards, little by little, answering engines, recommendations, matching, streaming, and virality gave us a comfortable immunity to any risk of unexpected encounters or “friction,” even though advertising was gaining in power to intrude. It is no longer a question of curiosity but of reputation, based on a visibility, a reactivity (high-frequency engagement) that the platforms encourage us to feed. The political economy of our attention has thus evolved in terms of the balance between regimes of attention (loyalty, projection, alertness, immersion) as the technical and economic infrastructure has itself evolved towards the unshared dominance of platforms. Both result in deeply undermining the desiring energy of curiosity.