Michael’s Public Sociology and the Attention Economy

This piece is a tribute to Michael’s innovative and influential idea of “public sociology” and how this can be enhanced to address the attention economy and the post-truth Trump era. Theoretically, he distinguished Marx from Polanyi and attempted to synthesize and extend their work, especially on the three waves of marketization, when examining capitalism, commodification, exploitation, and inequalities.

Michael, Marx, and Polanyi

Michael regarded Marx as a theorist of capitalist exploitation in production who was mainly concerned with the first wave of marketization. In contrast, Polanyi was a theorist of commodification in market relations who discussed the first and second waves. He observed how the marketization of fictitious commodities (labor power, money, and land), none of which are directly produced for sale although all have a price, led to the failure of self-regulating markets and prompted society to regulate them to preserve the use-value of such goods. Michael extended Polanyi’s analysis to include a third wave of marketization initiated by neoliberalism in the 1980s. This wave involved the commodification of nature and led to environmental degradation. It also commodified knowledge in the form of intellectual property rights and the university system.

This synthesis of Marx and Polanyi continued in 2022 when Michael drew on E.O. Wright’s theoretical and empirical research on “real utopias”. These do not abolish markets or states but subjugate them to the collective self-organization of society. They bring society back into socialism and show how, as countermovements, they are unified by their resistance to different forms of commodification, such as Wikipedia opposing the commodification of knowledge. Michael’s sociological Marxism saw public sociology as well-placed to explore fictitious commodification and how society reacts.

The attention economy and post-truth Trump era

Michael, in his last interview before he passed away most regrettably in 2025, highlighted the importance of the Trump era. This can be seen as the latest stage of third-wave marketization, especially that of the commodification of attention. At this stage, knowledge based on behavioral data is generated from social media users via fun-based gamification (e.g., quizzes, partnering with influencers, virtual currency, exclusive points systems, social networking, etc.) and hyperbolic discourses/images. These nudging practices keep users engaged and captured within the attention economy. Seen critically, human attention thus becomes a scarce resource that can be commodified to derive exchange value. Businesses compete to attract, capture, filter and monetize data and attention. Such commodification in the attention economy is mediated by Silicon Valley social-media titans (e.g., Meta’s Zuckerberg). These actors gather data on their platforms, collate them in their data centers, and hold the keys to algorithm designs and gamified/persuasive techniques aimed at keeping people’s attention focused on their websites. They also supply users with some media or socioeconomic products (e.g., digital giveaways, videos, newsfeeds, networking) to entice them and influence their opinions, and possibly to shape the economic and political outcome of events.

In this regard, people’s attention generates exchange value as it is both a resource and a currency. As a resource, it becomes important for boosting sales and influencing. As a currency, users’ cognitive, emotional, and affective attention can be exchanged for certain gifts and technological services (e.g., virtual event tickets, social engagement, Internet searches) and, in turn, surrenders some control over that very attention (e.g., exposure to advertisements and political “fast-food” tweets) to influencers and attention merchants. The latter derive exchange values by re-selling that control to advertisers, who pay based on how much attention is gained (e.g., how long and how deeply the users watch the advertisements). Likewise, influencers grab customers’ attention with Instagram, TikTok and X messages, and tweets, and seek to monetize their economic and political influences.

The attention economy is also reshaping politics and society. Trump epitomizes the post-truth attention-seeking celebrity, who created the Trump brand and now uses it as a politician. He draws attention via social media (e.g., Fox News, X, and Truth Social) as algorithmic filtering devices and echo chambers to connect politically like-minded individuals/groups. These allow him to caricature his opponents and deploy crowd-stirring soundbites and slogans (e.g., “Make America Great Again”) that speedily appeal to the emotions (e.g., hopes, fears, and anxieties) of his populist social base. Other politicians need to respond to his simplified memes and theatrical style, enabling him to shape discursive, emotional, and political spaces. Such retooling of political communication in this attention age touches individual–social cognitions (and emotions) and polarizes society along new lines.

Michael’s public sociology and post-disciplinarity

In response to Michael’s clarion call for public sociology, this development creates very fertile ground for practicing countermovements at the global level of third-wave marketization of the post-truth attention economy. Real utopias are the mediating link between Marx and Polanyi here, as they provide grassroots resistance that contests commodification of attention and cognition, though admittedly not always at a global scale. Examples of such grassroots action include “attention activism” of decentralized platforms and “attention sanctuaries” of digital detox at local levels that can be linked up with other (trans-)national scales. Apart from the scale issue, the commodification of attention covers micro-issues of human cognitions, feelings, and emotions as well as macro-institutional–computational foundations of attention as resource, currency, and manipulation through the control of behavioral information.

These changes may require us to stretch the sociological imagination further than before. Related countermovement publics may even have to imagine the need to re-mobilize public, policy, critical and professional sociologies as well as to combine subject areas in post-disciplinary ways to enhance our academic and communal knowledge. This involves moving beyond sociology and focusing on ideas and connections stemming from critical psychology, pedagogical and educational studies, computational science, media studies, discourse analysis, heterodox economics, and (international) political economy. The aim is to tackle this super-wave of the marketization of attention and cognition to enhance epistemological reflexivity on “real utopias” and promote greater institutional–agential performativity of these countermovements at different sites and scales.

Ngai-Ling Sum <n.sum@lancaster.ac.uk> and Bob Jessop <b.jessop@lancaster.ac.uk>, Lancaster University, UK