Time as a constituent value in attention economy

摘要

In today's global society, where everything flows like liquid through the digital network and its noise becomes obvious, attention has become the most searched item by message senders. “To be” does not just involve “being” and presenting oneself, or arrives by reaching visibility. What is cardinal, what is essential, is located in the field of perception. That is, “to be perceived” is what is substantial. And, besides, it should be considered that perception would turn vacuous and would dilute itself in the instant's own dimension that rules the essence of the digital society, unless it is capable to implicate the receiver in a singularized relationship in accordance with continuity, while this is sustained by the latter devoting its time. This way, the binomial attention-time necessarily becomes indissoluble. This new approach to the communicative connection between sender-receiver has triggered an important acceleration of the expansive process of content reformulation, the formats encapsulating them, and the media circulating them. Just arriving plays the role of what is contingent. What is nuclear is to “remain,” sustaining that singular, individualized dialogue that is inherent to the collectivization of the digital presence due to the successive incorporation of communicative action-reaction in the melting pot of incessant feedback. The struggle between senders to reach their “desired” receivers - united under the concept of public - now does not have the final purpose of “arriving,” reaching them, and exposing themselves to them. Now, it is all about capturing their attention and withholding it to receive retribution from them in time, which is possible to be monetized. What is difficult is to capture attention in the more and more complex digital world. That is why information and communication technologies direct their development to a more exhaustive knowledge of the “digital subject”, where the so-called “big data” plays an essential role to be able to predict and anticipate certain individual behaviours and have a positive bearing on “capturing” their attention and generating a higher degree of engagement. This is the foundation of the emerging content marketing.