Provoking Online Drama: How Attention Economies Are Changing

Looking at the phenomenon of visibility labour and attention economies on social media, this open access book focuses on the Asia Pacific region to examine the use of ’drama’ online for internet fame/infamy and financial gain.
On social media, the attention economy shapes and governs our engagement. Social media actors use a variety of tactics to gain our attention, to ’go viral’, and to become ’internet famous’. They manufacture extraordinary events, curate their lives for us to consume, and play on our emotions to draw us in. But relying on only the picture perfect, the pristine, and the prestigious a la ’aspirational’ role-modelling is fast becoming stale to audiences in this very saturated space.

Enter the use of ’online drama’ to wrestle for the attention spans of audiences, when social media actors use discursive and visual narratives centred on angst, shock, fear, shame, pity to generate visibility, yield interest, and provoke conversations in the gladiatorial arena of social media.
Through a range of lively case studies spanning platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, and popular online for a in the Asia Pacific region, this book explores topics such as ’shamelebrity’, the ’influencer apology’, ’call out culture’, ’cancel culture’, and ’meme factories’ to unpack that peculiarly contemporary online phenomenon: the culture and economy of online drama.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian government.

Crystal Abidin is Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies and Director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab at Curtin University, Australia.

Jin Lee is Research Fellw in the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab at Curtin University, Australia.