Digital communicative capitalization in the age of platforms and communicative abundance

Abstract

The authors deals with the model of digital communicative capitalization, which describes a crucial social-economical process of the age of communicative abundance. People and organizations are considered as investors operating within various digital attention markets. The main hypothesis is that these investors have different abilities to comprehend and take advantage of the opportunities, which attention markets propose to them in terms of accruing and increasing capital. The study was conducted relying on the established notions of different forms of capital coined by P. Bourdieu, as well as on related notions of immaterial capital developed in the wide range of scientific works on digitalization and critical theory of the Internet. Basing the model on them, the authors highlight the lack of transparency in the processes of conversion digital reflections of capitals to their real forms, and, therefore, propose such terms as “digital communicative capital” and “attention double exploitation”. The latter stresses the new layers of digital inequality, where the results of digital labor are being captured and monetized. The analysis of the potential elaboration of the whole model of digital communicative capitalization and outlined empirical prospects of applying its implications are the particular value of the study.