The Popularity Contest: Technology, Politics and the Machinery of Attention

The technologically mediated communications world increasingly operates as a popularity contest, and in that respect it possesses remarkably little substance beyond the contest itself. Visibility becomes evidence of relevance; circulation becomes evidence of importance; repetition becomes evidence of legitimacy. Politics becomes absurd for precisely the same reason. It is conducted inside communications systems that preferentially reproduce whatever captures attention and remains intelligible to the largest available audience. The game is lossy, messy and often spectacularly inefficient, but efficiency is beside the point. Its principal output is the continuation of the game.

Participation is not entirely voluntary. To question the contest, refuse it, or simply fail to perform adequately within it is to become progressively less visible. You do not cease to exist. In fact, exclusion and marginalisation remain structurally necessary because popularity requires a distribution: there must be a centre precisely because there are edges, winners because there are losers, visibility because most things remain unseen. Even withdrawal becomes legible through the system that renders it obscure. The peculiar violence of the arrangement is that existence and visibility become increasingly confused while remaining entirely different things.

What becomes popular is consequently not necessarily what is true, substantial, intelligent or useful, but what most readily synchronises with the prevailing distribution of attention at a particular moment. Popularity measures proximity to a moving statistical centre, the transient median values of a civilisation continuously measuring itself through its own communications machinery. The centre shifts, and the participants shift with it, producing the appearance of collective movement without requiring any corresponding increase in substance. Insofar as technologically mediated civilisation is a popularity contest, it is without substance beyond that contest; and insofar as it possesses substance within this machinery, that substance increasingly consists in the relations through which popularity is produced, sustained and validated.