Vanity Fairs

Georg Franck studied philosophy, economics and architecture and obtained his PhD in economics. In 1974 he became a practising architect and urban designer. In addition, he was active in software development, producing a planning information system which has been marketed since 1991. His theoretical interests asserted themselves against the hustle and bustle of the start-up scene. His work on philosophy and economic theory, rather, merged into the concept of the economy of attention, which he introduced in 1993. Continuing his parallel interests, he changed track from business to academia. From 1994 – 2015 he held the Chair of Digital Methods in Architecture and Planning at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, where his research focused on the economy of attention within the field of science, on the constituents of architectural quality, on algorithmic support of creative design, on the modelling of the city as a process, and the concept of an ‘urban commons’ as a reorganization of urban design according to the principles of peer-to-peer and open source. In 2004 he was appointed to teach attention economy, consciousness studies and philosophy of time as general education subjects at his university.

• Introduction.- Competition in the Service of Self-Esteem.- The Emergence of Canons.- Scientific Communication: A Vanity Fair?.- The Economy of Attention in the Age of Neoliberalism.- Deconstruction and the Fusion of Culture and Commerce.- Social Media and the Ecology of Emotion.- Moral Elegance: An Ethics Tailored to Vanity Fairs?.