> (who is top if you google "search engine" if not Google themselves?)
You'd be surprised. Google not even on the first page... except the last hit is an ad for "google search appliance." https://www.google.ca/#q=search+engine&safe=off > and ignoring mioneymaking in strategy is the fastest growing > financial behemoth ever, merely as an ironic side-effect. This strikes me as wishful thinking. Ignoring moneymaking in strategy?! http://tinyurl.com/mawmeox Like attention is some new commodity that replaces money? Why all the stained glass windows, then, and Sunday church service, not to mention the children saying their prayers before bed every night for the last two thousand years? Hell, you couldn't get your way in the ancient greek Agora without anyone's attention. But what is the purpose of attention-maximization if not the accumulation of more capital? Without money, the Church would have been in a bad position to enforce ideological norms and would have made a bad partner for the violent oligarchy. If all those Sunday worshippers didn't turn into "conversions" (as they say in web marketing) the Church would have been in trouble. > For example, you can no longer ignore the fact that there is an > enormous difference in power between somebody with 400,000 Twitter > followers and those with merely 10. Unless Twitter deletes their accounts. There's definitely the illusion of power, but I would draw attention to Bruce Sterling's definition of Web 2.0 as favela chic. It's not your real estate, just a few of your belongings that you've smuggled in. You could wake up in the morning to find them on the sidewalk. Certain types of symbolic power can be taken away as quickly as they are handed out by the powers-that-be. http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04/10/suspended-senator-patrick-braz eau-arrested-after-police-called-to-his-home-in-gatineau-at-4-a-m/ Someone with 400,000 twitter followers posting rude photos really doesn't have any particularly important power. I mean, Katy Perry? Justin Bieber? Are they more powerful than Barack Obama? He's number three to their one and two. You could say that Perry and Bieber embody normative values that are internalized by the public (their publics, anyway) through performance, consumption and repetition, but that doesn't give Perry or Bieber much more personal power than the lifeless sculptures of idealized humanity in ancient Greece. Privilege, yes, absolutely. But power? I don't think so. Perry can get hired, for instance, to recruit women for the US marines, thus attempting to drive male/female power relations in a new direction, but she is interchangeable in that role, and the power there comes from the money behind the campaign, which of course comes from the state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuwfgXD8qV8&list=PLJECfJQljDiWQ3a6YWu9g7hWImJXD1c1T - Flick -- * WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison * FLICK's WEBSITE: http://www.flickharrison.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org