an immanent critique of the attention economy

The present article develops an immanent critique of the attention economy as a power apparatus. In particular, it contends that what Foucault (2009) defined as the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of security entails a transformation of the main function of human attention: whereas in disciplinary societies attention (or the gaze) was aimed at imposing continuous surveillance on each individual, societies of security conceive the gaze of each subject as a source of data which allows constructing a new object of power, i.e., the population. To illustrate this, the present article focuses on the specific case of the attention economy and the notions of ‘dataveillance’ and ‘Big Data’.