#attention economy

4 links on advertising, attention and morality

1.On the Moral Superiority of (Web) Advertising
Mike Elgan, Datamation, July 2013

“Advertiser-supported search engines represent a transfer of wealth from the world’s rich to the world’s poor – without onerous taxation.”

2.Is Advertising Morally Justifiable? The Importance of Protecting Our Attention
Thomas Wells, ABC News Australia Religion & Ethics section, July 2015

“Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.”

3.What would Kant do? Ad blocking is a problem, but it’s ethical
Ricardo Bilton, Digiday, August 2015

David Whittier, a former professor of cyberethics at Boston University, said the clearest defense of ad blocking comes from utilitarianism, which suggests that the most ethical action is the one that maximizes utility. “In this case, ad blocking is completely ethical because it by far benefits more people than it harms,” he said. “Anyone who says that online advertising is annoying and distracting is absolutely right.”

4.The Future of Morality, at Every Internet User’s Fingertips
Tim Hwang, the Atlantic, August 2015

Two recent high-profile examples show the shape of an emerging notion of what we might call ethical attention. More than simply symbolic gestures, the refusal to link or click actually expresses a deeper vision of the role norms play in the evolution of the Internet, and more importantly, new ethical expectations for individuals and platforms on the web.

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As someone who both works in the broader advermarketingPR world and uses adblockers (two! Adblock Plus and Ghostery), it’s worth jotting down a few notes on where I sit.

1. I’m basically pro advertising-funded media, from news websites to TV & social networks. Why? Universalism.

It means we get communications platforms shared across all of society, not just an elite who’d pay a subscription. (While not subscription-funded, we can see what social media platforms for the heavy-user elite look like in Ello and Diaspora - they just weren’t any fun.)

This universalism is essential for creating a commons, a sense of society as a shared project.

Wells suggests taxation but I’m chary of increasing this, especially on a flat-rate basis like the BBC licensing fee. Elgan makes a not-entirely successful case for advertising by contrast functioning as a tax primarily on the rich. I am in favour of this.

2. Arguments about the ‘direct value’ or utility of advertising to the consumer are mostly bollocks, but…

The first article tries to make this argument in favour of search advertising - it’s eh. The second article seeks to argue against this 'utility’ position in four ways:

i. Consumers no longer struggle to find information to make purchases (we have price comparison websites)

ii. The signalling value of high advertising spending as indicating a company’s stature & trustworthiness is also daft, because inefficient way to this end. (cc a campaign to get Coca Cola to redirect its annual $3 billion ad spend to charity)

iii. The social status that advertising can confer on a product and its consumption

“What’s the point of buying a Rolex or Mercedes unless the people around you know that it is expensive and are able to appreciate how rich and successful you must be? The business logic here is sound, but not the moral logic. […] Such advertising constitutes a regressive tax imposed on the rest of us by luxury brands in order to increase the value of their products to rich people.”

iv. “Advertising creates value by spinning a story around a brand that customers want to buy into”

“I think the fashioning of these illusions - turning clothes into fashion; turning food into health; turning diamonds into love - is the most significant way that advertising creates economic value, as real as the transformation of steel into a car or cotton into cloth. But I am dubious of the worth of its achievement. In effect, advertising tries to do our practical reasoning for us, shaping and ordering our inchoate desires into actionable preferences for specific products. But will buying those things really make us happy?”

I guess I work in this industry because I believe that branding is the transformation of objects into symbols (a process I find inherently interesting), and that these branded symbols are as good as any others for communicating with.

Many people might like to conjugate this something like, “I make vaporwave music, you carry a Verso tote bag, and that sad bastard over there thinks his Nike trainers make him cool”… But same difference.

That is, I have bought things that have made me happy. Whether or not this stands up against serious philosophical arguments as to the nature of the 'good life’, I’m unsure. But infecting stuff with meaning works to create social value within the boundaries of the capitalist here-and-now, at least.

That said, meaning being social, I can’t separate point iv) from iii) and argue that the 'story’ only has value for people because it’s potentially wasted other folks’ time to create this shared, communicative capability.

3. The right to preserve our attention

These pro/anti- advertising arguments tend to be perceived in black and white terms - you’re either for or against it all. I’ll hope you’ll recognise that’s not hte argument I’m making here.

Instead I agree with pretty much everything Wells says about “The right to preserve our attention” - which is why I’m bringing in the adblockers piece as an example.

4. Why adblockers are moral, a precis of the Bilton article

i. Utilitarianism: Ads annoys more people than they benefit
ii. Informed consent: Readers have no idea how their data’s being sold to third parties, so may defend against this
iii. But Kant’s Categorial Imperative? Nope: “readers aren’t ethically obligated to support business models that can’t sustain themselves”

5. A fudged democracy

The Bilton adblockers article closes with the possibility that, if too many people use ad-blockers, sites will move over to subscription models - which would mean bye-bye universalism in order to push people into subscribing.

His implication is that this would represent something like the collective will of the consumer, at least in action if not conscious reckoning. In which case I’d have to agree it’s some kind of fair.

Which is more than can be maybe said of the kludge we have at present, where people like me get to enjoy our universal media cake and eat it, by using adblockers - i.e. profiting off the inertia of other folk who choose not to. Functional yes, ethical - I’m not so sure.

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[Photo by Scott Philips, Paris, 1983 - img src|his blog]

What’s So Great About That: Episode 28
The Speed (and Stillness) of Being Online (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the memes)

We’re all familiar with the idea that, with each passing decade, we’re moving ever faster, becoming more and more easily distracted - but, in the age of the hour long YouTube video and the increasingly overwhelming volume of media, can an argument be made for the opposite?