KON_F_06 Digital Publics and Ambivalent Participation. Non-Attention as a Mode of Social Cohesion

Objective / Research Question

Since the 20th century, attention has constituted a key concept, with the help of which the formation of publics is explained far beyond the specialized discourses found in science and journalism. In the context of digital social media, these explanatory approaches reach their culmination at the point where non-attention is also elevated to a normative participation model. Users are urged not to share content, in order not to provide a stage for certain actors, or for the purpose of controlling the dissemination of disinformation or to prevent the distraction from more important issues. Understood in this way, publics are the result of positive and negative attentional participation, and the modulation of collective attention is generalized beyond the professional ethics of journalism and towards a guiding principle for individual media users. A digital attention ethic thus understood often also integrates knowledge of algorithmic intermediaries, affective discourse strategies and dynamics of social emergence. On the one hand, the project therefore enquires into the socio-technical specifics that define this digital attention ethic. On the other hand, it also looks at how older structural descriptions of the public are transformed by this, such as the differentiation between the public as audience and the public as an official power endowed with a mandate to control. 

In the context of digital social media, public control is theoretically distributed across a large number of users, who simultaneously participate in the constitution of audiences. In addition, public control no longer targets merely governmental action but also the modus operandi of private sector algorithms, the contents of published materials and thus the creation of controversial publics itself. The co-constitution of audiences and controlling publics, however, complicates personal participation where public control is to be exercised without generating excessive attention and further audiences for certain contents, for example in the case of terrorist attacks, concerted disinformation or hate speech. In recent years, civil society organizations and experts have emerged as new infrastructures of this interface between audiences and public control. They operate alongside journalists and within the regimes of private sector platforms. The project’s hypothesis is that the ambivalence of attention as a mode of (social) participation can be studied most pertinently on and with these new actors.

The primary objective of the research project is to trace the conflicting role and discursive problematization of non-attention in the everyday life of social media users. To do so, the research project deploys discourse analysis tools and both traditional and digital ethnographic methods. Moreover, the project also reflects on the normative and cohesion-implicating status of attention in contemporary methods and models in the humanities. Problematizations of attention can be found, for example, in reflections about the ethnographic attunement to situational entanglements and in theoretical accounts of the recognizability of affects, culminating in an aisthetic ethic of recognition. Our assumption is that the varying approaches to attention in these theories and in the everyday practices of social media users can be set in a heuristically productive field of tension, in order to better understand the present-day scope of attention as a societal mode of participation.

Thematic Relevance to Social Cohesion

The cohesion of highly differentiated societies is dependent on a wide range of media and publics that both facilitate and give permanence to the interaction between different social networks. Media and publics do not precede these interactions and the differentiation of networks as if they were independent mediators outside the social order. Instead, they are part of that movement by which social structures are stabilized and coordinated and social cohesion and differences are expressed. This becomes all the clearer when media and publics are not viewed as substances and separate from each other, but when we instead turn to the always different mediality of publicizing, publishing or making public. The establishment of publics requires certain material and operational infrastructures, which must be negotiated, cared for and maintained in continuous stabilization processes. Addressing the topic of attention is part of this infrastructural process insofar as it makes available norms of action and explanatory frameworks for the (self)observation of these practices of making public. 

While, for a long time, the relevance of attention for the observation of publics and of strategies of making public was limited to individual professional fields (such as journalism) or specific media contexts, it has now become generalized as a means of explanation. Accordingly, the historical process of a pluralization and fragmentation of publics seems to be connected with a generalization of attention as an explanatory framework and also has an impact on the description of social cohesion. At present, to be familiar with the publishing and publicizing practices and the attention mechanisms of digital social media, dealing with them in a curated and reflective manner, is increasingly framed as a social skill of its own. Thus, conveyed by the perpetual and precarious constitution of publics, it seems that attention has become a variable and a technique of social cohesion.