#georg franck

[malieck]

"Authentisch ist die Kunst, an der die Kapazität des bewussten Erlebens wächst."

— Georg Franck: Autonomie, Markt und Aufmerksamkeit. In: Mediale Erregungen. Tübingen 2009, S. 13.

[proseprunings]

Idea-economy has taken the lead. ...The media's supply keeps growing. What is thus expanding is not just their contribution to the national product, and their attention turnover. What is expanding is the aspect of reality especially produced to attract attention. ... What is clear is that a major part of socially perceived reality is highly synthetic, as it is especially produced for use in the fight for attention.    "Of course people know about the pre-structured and fiction-permeated share in what the media present to them. But it would be naive to believe that it is all that easy to distinguish between fact and fiction. For attentive beings like us, only that which retains our attention is real. This in turn does not mean that everything we imagine or think of is real for us. We are very well able to distinguish between perception, recollection and imagination. But we are not as easily able to stop some recollection acting like a real event, or to prevent an idea from exerting real power. Anybody in love knows about the unruliness of imaginative processes, any jealous person knows the relentlessness of recollections. It is in the stratum of such phenomena that the media are poaching for attention.   "There is nothing more real than images which stick to the mind. Nothing exerts greater power over us than that which forces us to take attentive note. Everything to which we inadvertently pay attention, inadvertently exerts some effect on us. And everything that captures our attention is real to a higher degree than the background. To be sure, there is little in the media which sticks to the mind. Luckily, there is no obligation to pay attention, either. But there is enough which attracts, which caters to laziness, which may be taken in on the side. And everything in which attention gets entangled becomes, first of all, real in a subjective sense.

Georg Franck, “The Economy of Attention,” Telepolis, December 7,1999, https://www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Economy-of-Attention-3444929.html