Week 7 Reading Response

In reading Evan Watkins’s Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital, the concept that most grabbed my attention was attention. In Chapter 3 “Star Power,” Watkins’s discusses the “attention market” describing an economic understanding of attention as “a primary and still underexploited resource” that can be capitalized on to secure profit (94). In many discussions of marketing and branding, which I have had in my previous journalism education and public relations jobs, I participated in discussion about raising consumer interactions (clicks, reviews, comments) and increasing brand recognition. In positions where I was reaching for attention I had not consider attention as a resource purchased and sold as a product/good/service for a profit. Though I would have been quick to see attention as needed to secure sales, I had not considered attention as a commodifiable raw material involved in the production of marketing. I had not thought of television, video games, and offer media as attention purchasing devices. While I would have been quick to think of time as a commodity—a concept familiarized in such terms as wage theft—and of time as finite, I had not thought of attention as likewise commodified and finite. This understanding of all media interactions and by extension all literacy experiences as successful attention purchases by large market forces both blew my mind and made me feel a lack of agency over my own life and literacies. If I sit down to have a beer and watch a football game, what is buying my attention? The NFL? A brewery? The companies advertising? A specific franchise? ESPN? My TV producers? If I go for a run and listen to an audiobook, what has purchased my attention, and who has profited? My gym? My shoe company? Fitbit? Voice actors? An author? And in reading Watkins’s text in what ways and by whom and what has my attention being cultivated and used? Perhaps I’m to susceptible to the arguments of written texts, or perhaps my attention is too easily purchased.