March Research Colloquium: Dr. Christopher Wells Presents "The politics of attention: Understanding the currency of the hybrid media system"

The attention economy, or the logics by which attention is generated and transformed into various forms of power, is coming into focus as a central feature of our political-media system. This talk is grounded in contemporary theoretical work directed at understanding attention, publicity and visibility in the hybrid media system. It then draws on evidence from several aspects of the American election in 2016, including news media treatment of Donald Trump, the “media-hacking” of far-right social media networks, and the information operations of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, to rethink what we know about political communication under conditions of the attention economy.