The Economics of (In)Attention in YouTube Shakespeare

Authors

Christy Desmet University of Georgia

Abstract

Cluster: Modes and Models of (In)Attention

Economic metaphors have long been used as shorthand for the aesthetic, literary, cultural, or rhetorical value of Shakespearean appropriations: Shakespeare possesses and confers cultural capital; he is "big-time" art (Bristol 1996). Economic metaphors are also central to discussion of the cultural dynamics of Web 2.0: we live in an information economy and are driven by an economics of attention, as defined by Richard A. Lanham (2006). Since its founding in May 2005, YouTube has sought to exploit the economics of attention by linking "real" dollars to a video's ability to attract viewers. YouTube, however, has never been profitable, so that the economics of attention on the site has become a self-perpetuating phenomenon — artistic and social, without conferring capital. This essay suggests as well a further revision to YouTube's participation in the economics of attention. Particularly in the case of amateur YouTube Shakespeare appropriations, the site's dynamics operate through a dialectic between the art of creating and consuming attention structures and a residual resistance to the compulsion to get and give attention. Central to the experience of the bard on YouTube is a complementary economics of (in)attention.

Author Biography

Christy Desmet, University of Georgia

Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. The author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Reading, Ethics, and Identity (Massachusetts 1992), she is also editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer, Routledge 1999), Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer, Palgrave 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams, Wales 2009), and Helen Faucit (Pickering and Chatto 2011). With Sujata Iyengar, she founded and co-edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.