This is a Popularity Contest: Exploring the Cultural Significance of Financialized Digital Footprints

This article argues that the rise of financial capitalism and the development of digital infrastructures have had a profound and still insufficiently theorized effect on the political economy of attention in the cultural industries. Specifically, attention has become an asset for technological platforms through the quantification and management of user-generated data. This is a significant shift from previous conceptualizations of attention as (a) a commodity waiting to be exchanged or (b) a form of nontransferable capital held by well-known brands or people. Drawing on literature about the assetization of data, I argue that the economy of attention can also be understood through logics of accumulation and the creation of future income streams. At the same time, attention data is different from other data assets considering the unique labor relations through which it is produced. Furthermore, the economization of attention has already been shown to have deep sociocultural consequences. The financial and technological move toward attention assetization also has important symbolic and moral ramifications. The final part of the article explores some of these implications, like the increased cultural value of popularity and the delegitimation of other forms of worth in contemporary societies.