Attention! As Economy, Commodity, and Labor

Attention has become a valuable commodity in our digitally mediated world. 

This lecture is about how far people will go to capture attention, themselves getting value captured in the process. For philosophers, to be value captured is to have your internal system of values (your beliefs, your tastes, and what you deem important) replaced by an external system, in this case, the metrics of a social media platform: views, likes, and money. 

To discover this process, I conducted immersive ethnography and I worked alongside and learned from some of the world’s most highly watched content creators between 2020 – 2025. I joined what is known as a content farm, because it produces a high volume of disposable content with perceived low social value, reproducing the logic of a Bourdieusian cultural field. Based in Las Vegas, I filmed videos with them, studied their labor process, and for a brief and thrilling moment, I became one of them, making videos with millions of views that, to this day, I find rather distasteful. 

This talk ultimately presents a feminist reworking of Bourdieu’s symbolic capital for the age of digital cultural production.

ABOUT THE Speaker

Ashley Mears is Professor and Chair of Cultural Sociology and New Media at the University of Amsterdam.  She works in cultural, gender, and economic sociology, focusing on processes of valuation and the circulation of non-financial forms of value. 

She has conducted ethnographies of fashion, elites, and viral social media. Her books have been translated into French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian, and her work has been featured in outlets ranging from The New York Times, The Financial Times, Le Monde, and Chinese Cosmo.  She is writing a book on the attention economy, told through a case of magicians who got rich making viral videos.  She is learning a lot about Facebook algorithms, and is also learning Dutch.