“Attention is the Beginning of Devotion”: Elections, Political Communication, and the Value of Attention
There is a new kind of economy in the United States. It cannot be found on the floor of the NYSE and it is especially difficult to spot in the pages of the trades. Despite this, big companies, like Facebook and Google, are investing and making a huge profit. It’s the attention economy, more specifically the political attention economy. Dealing in our personal information as well as who we grant our eyes and ears, this system keeps track of where attention has been paid and to whom it is owed (Franck 2018). Over the past four years of the Trump presidency, we’ve been given a crash course in the consequences, as well as the benefits, of having our attention worked upon. I want to discuss the value of different kinds of attention in this market, who exactly is attempting to control your attention, how that is being done, and what can we do to make this economy work for us.
Even though there is a lot of ink spilled about the persuasive powers of the various media we give our attention to, research has shown that the effects are not as large as we might think. Coppock et al. argue, in their paper on the small effects of political advertising, that campaign television advertisements are tiny in their impact but those fluctuations, in a divided polity, can be very important (Coppock et al. 2020). In this most recent election, votes cast in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Georgia fall heavier into the ballot box than those in New York City. That is to say, they’re weighted differently. In the sphere of the attention economy, it’s fair to draw the conclusion that not all attention is created equal. If you create advertisements that fail to capture the attention of potential voters, especially those in key voting blocs, that might be a problem for your campaign’s efforts to garner the support of who your ads are directed towards.
There is evidence to show that these small effects might be getting smaller and smaller. In other words, the demographics they target are increasingly more specific. The micro-targeting of individuals who belong to typically homogenized social groups carries with it both a blessing and a curse. Measuring the reception to different types of political ads targeting specific subsets of people within the Latinx population, Mara Ostfeld noted that these varying messages are important for combating the perceptions of in-group homogeneity, even for activating political interest. If a person has never been targeted for a political ad or been approached by a canvasser, they may develop the perception that their voice does not concern those who they would vote for. Perceptions of homogeneity decrease turnout and can have negative effects on people’s self-esteem. Not every member of a marginalized group thinks the same, and it follows that they also direct their attention to different sources. With the goal of increasing heterogeneity in the political representation of Latinx people, advertisements, both on television and online, have seized on specific demographic information to inform their tone, messaging, and issue coverage. As the Latinx population has increased in size, so too has their political sway, and elites have taken notice. By honing in on different types of voters in an attempt to best activate them politically, politicians and academics alike are working, albeit for different reasons, to find out what happens when you “use corporatized identities as a tool for social outreach” (Ostfeld 2017). Information is the copper wire that runs throughout the attempts to catch our attention wherever it may be found, and the methods are getting more and more complex, attracting higher and higher bidders.
In 2016, Philadelphia wasn’t just the home of the liberty bell and UPenn students getting mad when people called their school Penn State, it was the stomping ground of both the Democratic National Convention and big tech companies looking to cash in on the electoral process. As social media has developed and matured over the years, big wigs in tech companies have realized they possess near-perfect avenues to the attention of the nation’s electorate. Sidebar: there is a concept in architecture called “desire lines” or “desire paths”, that appear when there is no easy route to where people want to go. . The trampled ground to the side of a trail that marks a quicker way to get to the next section, a pond, or otherwise some scenic outlook not on the original path. We’ve all seen them, though they may be difficult to spot. Countless stories exist of colleges leaving their quads unpaved so the students, making trails in the mud, inadvertently decide where the paved sections are going to be (Moor 2017). While desire paths as a phenomenon have mostly been used in the fields of architecture and nature conservation, they hold a lesson that social media and tech companies getting into the field of politics have picked up on. The information available on the individual’s public profiles are the mud tracks that hold the potential to be paved by particular candidates in an electoral process. If a social media company shows a candidate the ground, they can pave, if the price is right. An example of this, as detailed in an article by Kriess and McGregor, is when both Google and the Jeb Bush team noticed that one of the most popular search terms during the debates considering the candidate was “how tall is Jeb Bush?”. As a result, they designed an infographic that showed Jeb, at an impressive 6’ 3”, next to professional athletes. The logic here is that, to many people, height equals leadership. This picture offers a piece of information made to, ever so slightly, turn voter’s attention to the presidential qualities of Jeb Bush (Kriess and McGregor, 2018). While the campaign itself was unsuccessful to the point of being parodic, the Google strategist assigned to the Bush team knew how to market to people’s attention as well as spot, and follow “desire paths”. Attention has no exchange rate and experts have devised ways to make the most out of every second of it you give. The cunning of tech firms has been discussed at length elsewhere but what’s important to keep in mind is that these companies, no matter how hard they try to lobby you, are interested chiefly in your information and your attention.
With our country more polarized than ever, it’s no surprise that while people’s attention can be monetized and toyed with, we are only prepared to believe and accept certain pieces of political information. While not necessarily “primed” for this, Lenz observes that we are often likely to adopt the views of our preferred political party in reaction to news and policy items. The compulsion to toe the party line on issues is an example of how our attention has been successfully manipulated by party politics. Ensuring attention is paid in certain ways about specific issues and even about certain candidates, the power of the people’s vote can be altered before it is cast.
Strategic discrimination, the process of quietly excluded certain candidates from electoral consideration, is responsible for the restrictive convention of “electability”. While your attention may be excited by someone running for office who is a woman and/or a person of color, or otherwise holds ideals that are outside of the box in the popular case of Bernie Sanders, strategic discrimination is there to tell you that they don’t have the “widespread appeal” needed to carry a national election. This appeal, while reeking of racism and sexism, is harder to combat because it’s not me who thinks this but other people, and you know how hateful they are (Bateson, 2019). Though strategic discrimination has been successful at putting weights on the ankles of democratic progress, winds are changing and attitudes with them, if ever so slightly. Kamala Harris being the first woman and person of color to serve in the position of Vice President is a huge step forward for diversity in mainstream party politics. Though her personal record on criminal justice leaves a lot to be desired, her inclusion on the ticket is a start, one long overdue. Efforts for diversity and inclusion serve a greater purpose than just changing the demographics of those in office, though that is a very important thing to do. All of these endeavors serve to make sure the attention of the voting population does not go to waste or is ever given begrudgingly. In other words, representation matters. More needs to be done to ensure equity in our electoral process but hope for the future is alive and well.
The attention economy is most easily spotted when it is obviously being gamed. Twitter, the battleground for popular politics, has been used over the past four years by President Trump as a diversionary tactic. Flaring up some feud or frenzy whenever there is information in the mainstream media that affects his public image poorly. More than any other leader in recent memory, Trump is very informed by television. We know this because he tells us, via Twitter, all the time. Knowledgeable as he is about the scope of his influence as well as the foibles of the news media, his diversionary tactics are successful at shifting the attention of the public away from information that’s damaging to his administration and onto an unrelated, oftentimes ridiculous news item. He is better at this some times more than others, ranging between employing brilliant diversionary tactics to basically doing cartwheels in front of a house fire. Our attention is not a high-brow part of our collective consciousness. We enjoy things that are crass, rude, and strange, and sometimes how we pay attention to politics reflects that. Attention is a valuable commodity that we give away in order to consume a myriad of things, and what Trump’s use of Twitter demonstrates is that, if we are to absorb media and information at the same or increasing rates in the future, we need to be more cognizant to when we are being played for a fool.
Dealings within the political attention economy are not just the concerns of those ensconced in the world of government. What happens on that hypothetical trading floor has effects that reverberate through our towns and into our homes. Because what is more important than our attention is our vote. What can be taken wholesale from this concept is the importance of awareness, keeping our heads on as to how attention is toyed with and controlled in order to have us tilt one way or another on the political spectrum. We’ve been able to see that this activated awareness is still in the process of ossifying into a tangible political platform, but there is hope to be found in its existence. This country’s demographics are changing and while we may be discouraged when walking our “desire path” to progress, the world only spins forward.
Works Cited: Bibliography:
Bateson, R. (2020). Strategic Discrimination. Perspectives on Politics, 1–20.
Coppock, A., Hill, S. J., & Vavreck, L. (2020). The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver: Evidence from 59 real-time randomized experiments. Science advances, 6(36), eabc4046.
Franck, G. (2019). The economy of attention. Journal of Sociology, 55(1), 8–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783318811778
Kreiss, D., & McGregor, S. C. (2018). Technology firms shape political communication: The work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google with campaigns during the 2016 US presidential cycle. Political Communication, 35(2), 155–177.
Lenz, G. (2009). “Learning and Opinion Change, Not Priming: Reconsidering the Priming Hypothesis.” American Journal of Political Science. 53(4): 821–837.
Moor, R. (2017, February 20). Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire. The New Yorker. Tracing (and Erasing) New York’s Lines of Desire
Ostfeld, M. (2017). Unity versus uniformity: Effects of targeted advertising on perceptions of group politics. Political Communication, 34(4), 530–547.
