Monday, 19 October 2026

Paper 204: From Eisenstein’s Montage to the Attention Economy Film Editing, Algorithmic Feeds, and the Politics of Digital Attention

Paper 204: From Eisenstein’s Montage to the Attention Economy
Film Editing, Algorithmic Feeds, and the Politics of Digital Attention
Assignment of Paper 204: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
From Eisenstein to Endless Scrolling

Academic Details

  • Name: Nidhi R. Pandya
  • Roll No.: 20
  • Enrollment No.: 5108250024
  • Sem.: 3
  • Batch: 2025 - 2027
  • E-mail: nidhipandya206@gmail.com

Assignment Details

  • Paper Name: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
  • Paper No.: Paper 204
  • Paper Code: 22409
  • Topic: From Eisenstein’s Montage to the Attention Economy: Film Editing, Algorithmic Feeds, and the Politics of Digital Attention
  • Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
  • Submitted Date: October 19th 2026

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  • Reading time: 16 m 54 s

Table of Contents

Abstract

This assignment examines the conceptual and political trajectory from Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage as dialectical collision and ideological construction to the algorithmic curation of attention on contemporary short-video platforms such as TikTok. It argues that the principles of juxtaposition, conflict, and the production of meaning through the collision of discrete units—central to Eisenstein’s silent cinema—have been transformed, intensified, and largely depoliticised under the conditions of the digital attention economy. Drawing on classical film theory and recent scholarship on algorithmic media, the study analyses how metric, rhythmic, and intellectual forms of montage reappear in the rapid sequencing of short-form video, while recommendation systems reorganise publics into interest clusters rather than networked communities. The discussion addresses the commodification of attention, the extraction of algorithmic attention rents, the ethics of platform-induced addiction, racialised and gendered inequalities of credit and visibility, and the ideological implications of opaque curation. By tracing continuities and ruptures between revolutionary cinematic form and contemporary platform logics, the assignment demonstrates that digital attention is not merely a commercial resource but a site of political struggle over perception, collectivity, authorship, and agency.

Keywords

Eisenstein, montage, attention economy, algorithmic curation, TikTok, dialectical collision, short-form video, platform power, interest clusters, algorithmic rents

Research Question

How do the formal principles of Eisensteinian montage—juxtaposition, collision, and the dialectical production of meaning—reappear, mutate, and become politicised within the algorithmic attention economy of short-video platforms, and what are the ideological consequences of this transformation for contemporary digital publics, authorship, and collective perception?

Hypothesis

The hypothesis of this study is that algorithmic feeds on platforms such as TikTok operationalise a depoliticised yet intensified form of montage: discrete audiovisual fragments are continuously collided and sequenced to maximise engagement and extract attention rents, thereby converting Eisenstein’s revolutionary technique of ideological construction into an instrument of continuous attention capture, affective modulation, the fragmentation of publics into interest clusters, and the uneven distribution of visibility and credit.

Introduction

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage remains one of the most influential contributions to the understanding of cinematic form and its political possibilities. For Eisenstein, montage was never a neutral technique of continuity or invisible storytelling. It was a dialectical process in which the collision of independent shots produces a new concept that exceeds the sum of its parts. In works such as Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1925), the juxtaposition of images generated intellectual and emotional effects that served explicitly political ends. Montage, in this framework, functioned simultaneously as aesthetic method, cognitive operation, and ideological weapon.

Nearly a century later, the rapid sequencing of short audiovisual units on algorithmic platforms appears, at first glance, to revive montage principles with unprecedented intensity. TikTok’s For You Page, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts present users with an endless stream of discrete clips whose succession is governed by recommendation systems rather than by the conscious design of a single director. The formal operations of cutting, collision, and rhythmic acceleration are everywhere. Yet the political valence of this contemporary montage has shifted dramatically. Where Eisenstein sought to construct revolutionary consciousness through conflict, platform algorithms optimise for retention, completion rates, engagement metrics, and the monetisation of attention.

This assignment situates the transition from classical montage to algorithmic feeds within the broader framework of the attention economy. It draws on foundational studies of Eisenstein’s theory—Kuiper’s analysis of metaphor-producing juxtaposition, Siegler’s emphasis on montage-as-collision, Odin’s exploration of Japanese aesthetic influences, Baron’s work on performance and gesture as montage elements, and Parra’s recent examination of the collective and the individual in Eisenstein’s evolving practice—and on recent scholarship that examines TikTok’s transformation of social media publics, the data-driven reorganisation of attention, the ambiguity of credit and authorship, the ethics of platform addiction, the political economy of algorithmic rents, the limits of the attention-economy framework itself, and the practical challenges of public engagement within the attention economy.

The central claim is that digital platforms have absorbed and redirected the formal power of montage while evacuating much of its original political intentionality. Collision becomes continuous stimulation; dialectical synthesis becomes algorithmic clustering; and the spectator is reconstituted as a source of behavioural data and attention rent rather than as a political subject capable of critical synthesis. The discussion proceeds through seven analytical sections that move from Eisenstein’s theoretical foundations to the political, economic, ethical, and cultural consequences of algorithmic attention. Together these sections establish that the politics of digital attention cannot be understood without recovering the formal and ideological stakes of montage.

1. Eisenstein’s Montage as Dialectical Collision and Metaphorical Production

Eisenstein’s conception of montage rests on the principle that meaning arises not from the smooth linkage of shots but from their conflictual juxtaposition. Montage is understood as a process analogous to Marxist dialectics: thesis and antithesis collide to produce a synthesis that constitutes a new idea. This theoretical position distinguishes Eisenstein sharply from continuity editing traditions that prioritise invisible transitions and narrative transparency. The spectator is not merely guided through a story but is compelled to perform an active intellectual and emotional labour of synthesis.

1.1. Montage as Collision rather than Linkage

Eisenstein insisted that the essence of cinema lies in the collision of independent shots. Each shot functions as a discrete cell whose interaction with the next generates an intellectual or emotional explosion. Robert Siegler’s extrapolation of this theory emphasises that montage-as-collision produces ideological construction rather than mere sequential storytelling. The spectator is forced to synthesise conflicting images into a higher-order concept, thereby participating in the production of meaning. This participatory dimension is crucial: montage does not deliver a pre-formed message so much as it stages the conditions under which a new idea can emerge in the mind of the viewer.

1.2. Metaphor-Producing Juxtaposition

John B. Kuiper’s analysis of Eisenstein’s silent montage highlights the capacity of juxtaposition to generate metaphor. Visual images, like linguistic units, can be combined so that associations arising from their meanings produce figurative effects. The famous sequence of the three stone lions in Battleship Potemkin—sleeping, awakening, and rising—illustrates how successive images construct a metaphorical argument about the awakening of revolutionary consciousness. Montage here operates as a form of cinematic rhetoric capable of producing abstract political statements through concrete visual collision.

1.3. Aesthetic Foundations and Japanese Influences

Steve Odin has demonstrated the significant influence of traditional Japanese aesthetics on Eisenstein’s thinking. Concepts drawn from haiku, kabuki theatre, and the ideogrammatic structure of Japanese writing informed Eisenstein’s understanding of discontinuous yet generative juxtaposition. The collision of images could produce a conceptual whole without relying on continuous narrative linkage, much as a haiku presents discrete perceptions that crystallise into a single insight. This cross-cultural dimension underscores both the formal sophistication of Eisenstein’s method and its openness to non-Western aesthetic logics.

1.4. Performance, Gesture, and Embodied Montage

Cynthia Baron’s reconsideration of montage in relation to performance further expands the concept beyond the purely visual cut. Montage is not confined to the editing of shots; it also encompasses the selection and combination of gestures, movements, and expressions. Actors’ physical actions become montage elements that interact with framing, duration, and cutting to produce meaning. This insight is particularly productive for analysing contemporary short-form video, in which creator performance, facial micro-expressions, and bodily rhythm are inseparable from the algorithmic sequencing of clips.

1.5. The Collective and the Individual in Eisenstein’s Evolving Practice

Ricardo Parra’s recent study traces the mutation in Eisenstein’s work from an early emphasis on the collective revolutionary hero to a later focus on the individual historical figure, corresponding to broader shifts in Soviet cultural policy from the relative pluralism of the NEP period toward Stalinist Socialist Realism. This historical trajectory reveals that montage itself was never a fixed technique but a form whose political and narrative orientation changed in response to ideological pressure. The tension between collective and individual remains relevant for understanding how algorithmic systems today organise attention around both mass trends and highly personalised clusters.

Taken together, these dimensions establish montage as a formal system capable of generating metaphor, ideology, embodied meaning, and shifting relations between collective and individual. The subsequent sections examine how this system is transformed under algorithmic conditions.

2. From Revolutionary Form to Algorithmic Sequencing: Continuities and Mutations in Short-Form Video

The formal operations of Eisensteinian montage reappear, in mutated form, in the rapid editing practices of TikTok and related platforms. Short-form video relies on abrupt transitions, rhythmic acceleration, text overlays, and the juxtaposition of disparate audiovisual fragments. Yet the intentionality and political horizon of these operations have been fundamentally altered. What was once a directed construction of consciousness becomes a continuous, data-driven optimisation of engagement.

2.1. Metric and Rhythmic Montage in the Attention Economy

Eisenstein distinguished metric montage (cutting according to absolute length) from rhythmic montage (cutting according to the movement within the frame and the development of action). Contemporary short-video editing frequently employs both: clips are timed to musical beats or to platform-optimised retention intervals, while internal motion, zooms, and text animations accelerate affective response. The goal is no longer the construction of a coherent ideological argument but the maximisation of completion rates, rewatches, and subsequent recommendations. The formal tools of montage survive; their purpose is inverted.

2.2. Intellectual Montage without Dialectical Synthesis

Intellectual montage, which Eisenstein regarded as the highest form, sought to produce abstract ideas through the collision of conceptual images. Algorithmic feeds generate continuous collisions of images, sounds, texts, and memes, yet the resulting “ideas” are more often affective intensities, ironic associations, or memetic recognitions than dialectical arguments. The spectator is stimulated and prompted to continue scrolling rather than invited into sustained critical synthesis. The political potential of intellectual montage is thereby neutralised even as its formal intensity is amplified by the speed and volume of algorithmic delivery.

2.3. Creator Performance as Contemporary Montage Cell

Drawing on Baron’s framework, the individual TikTok creator functions as a mobile montage unit. Gesture, facial expression, vocal delivery, sound choice, and on-screen text collide within the fifteen-to-sixty-second format. The algorithmic system then collides these units with one another according to behavioural data. Montage is no longer the exclusive province of the director-editor but is distributed across millions of creators and the recommendation engine that sequences their output. The result is a massively parallel, continuously updating form of montage whose overall logic remains opaque to most participants.

2.4. The Speed of Collision and the Exhaustion of Attention

The acceleration of cultural attention cycles, documented across multiple domains, finds its purest expression in short-form video. Content rises and falls with extreme rapidity; trends exhaust themselves within days or hours. This temporal compression intensifies the formal power of collision while simultaneously reducing the space for reflective synthesis. What Eisenstein achieved through carefully calculated sequences is now produced at industrial scale by systems optimised for the rapid consumption and discarding of attention.

This section demonstrates that formal continuities between classical montage and algorithmic sequencing are real and significant, yet they serve a different political economy of attention—one oriented toward continuous capture rather than transformative consciousness.

3. Algorithmic Publics: From Networked Communities to Interest Clusters

Paolo Gerbaudo’s analysis of TikTok identifies a structural transformation in the organisation of online publics. First-generation social media platforms centred on networked publics formed through explicit interpersonal connections—friendships, follows, and mutual visibility. TikTok and similar platforms generate clustered publics: statistically constructed neighbourhoods of users grouped by behavioural similarity and shared interests rather than by social ties.

3.1. The Shift from Networks to Clusters

Recommendation systems assemble audiences around content rather than around relationships. Users are exposed to material selected for predicted engagement rather than for relational proximity. This produces extraordinarily high levels of attention concentration while simultaneously depersonalising online experience. The “For You” logic replaces the “who you know” logic with a “what you might like” calculus.

3.2. Opacity and the Loss of Structural Transparency

The algorithmic construction of clusters renders the structures of online communication increasingly opaque. Users cannot readily discern why particular content reaches them, how their interests have been classified, or how publics are being assembled and reassembled. Gerbaudo notes that this opacity contributes to a growing sense of disconnection even amid intense engagement.

3.3. Subcultural Fragmentation and the Limits of Collectivity

Clustered publics facilitate rapid mobilisation around shared interests and aesthetic styles, yet they inhibit the formation of broader solidarities. The dialectical collision that once aimed at collective consciousness is replaced by the continuous reinforcement of existing preferences and affective dispositions. Attention is captured within narrow enclaves whose boundaries are continually redrawn by the algorithm.

3.4. Political Implications for the Public Sphere

The transformation from networked to clustered publics has profound consequences for the possibility of a shared critical public sphere. When attention is organised around statistical proximity of interest rather than around deliberative encounter, the conditions for collective political reflection are weakened. Montage’s original promise of forging new forms of collective perception is inverted into a technology of fragmentation.

4. The Data Attraction Model and the Reshaping of the Attention Economy

Zhen Zhang (published as Meng Liang) argues that platforms such as Douyin/TikTok instantiate a “data attraction model” that supersedes earlier influencer-centred attention economies. Content is classified according to digital labels and modular features recognised by machine learning systems. Attention is attracted less by the personality or charisma of a human influencer than by the algorithmic performance of modular content units measured in real time.

4.1. From Influencer Charisma to Modular Data

In the data attraction model, metrics such as completion rate, viewing duration, likes, shares, and interaction signals determine visibility. Human creators become suppliers of modular units whose value is calculated dynamically. This represents a radical intensification of flexible accumulation within participatory media: labour is fragmented, metrics are immediate, and accumulation is continuous yet precarious for individual creators.

4.2. Consequences for Content Production and Aesthetic Form

Creators adapt their practices to the demands of the algorithm, producing shorter, more rapidly paced, more easily categorisable, and more immediately affective material. The formal principles of montage—collision, rhythm, juxtaposition—are subordinated to the requirements of data extraction and recommendation optimisation. Aesthetic decisions become, in effect, experiments in algorithmic legibility.

4.3. Global Convergence of Platform Logics

Although exemplified by Chinese platforms, the data attraction model is increasingly visible across Western short-video services. The reorganisation of attention around algorithmic modularity constitutes a general tendency of contemporary digital media rather than a culturally specific phenomenon. Platforms compete by refining the same core logic: maximising the efficiency with which attention can be attracted, measured, and monetised.

4.4. The Limits of the Attention-Economy Framework

Greg Elmer has cautioned against treating the attention economy as a universal or fully adequate explanatory framework. Focusing solely on attention risks overlooking the financial and infrastructural processes through which platforms convert user activity into capital. The data attraction model must therefore be understood not only as a transformation of attention but as part of a broader political economy of platform financialisation.

5. Algorithmic Attention Rents and Platform Market Power

Tim O’Reilly, Ilan Strauss, and Mariana Mazzucato advance a theory of algorithmic attention rents. As platforms grow, they acquire the capacity to extract rents from users, suppliers (creators), and advertisers through algorithmic control over attention. Attention harvested from users is monetised by being resold within advertising markets or used to shape competitive conditions in ways that advantage the platform itself.

5.1. Control over the Allocation of Attention as Market Power

Platforms decide which content receives visibility and which is suppressed or demoted. This power constitutes a form of market power that operates on the “free” side of the platform economy. The ability to direct attention becomes a rent-generating asset independent of the production of content itself.

5.2. Implications for Creators, Advertisers, and Users

Creators and advertisers become dependent on the opaque metrics through which attention is allocated. Users supply the raw material of attention without transparent knowledge of how it is valued or redirected. The platform captures value from the labour of content production and from the attention of users while remaining largely unaccountable for the distributive consequences of its algorithmic decisions.

5.3. Regulatory Implications and the Demand for Transparency

O’Reilly, Strauss, and Mazzucato argue that regulation should mandate disclosure of the operating metrics used to allocate attention and of the mechanisms through which that attention is monetised. Without such transparency, algorithmic control remains a black box of political-economic power. The demand for metric disclosure is simultaneously an economic and a democratic demand.

5.4. Attention Rents and the Politics of Visibility

The extraction of attention rents is inseparable from the politics of who is seen and who remains invisible. Algorithmic systems do not merely allocate attention neutrally; they reproduce and sometimes intensify existing inequalities of race, gender, and class in the distribution of visibility and credit.

6. The Ethics of Attention Capture, Platform Addiction, and the Ambiguity of Credit

Vikram R. Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez contend that social media platforms are commonly designed in ways that render them addictive. The attention-economy business model strongly incentivises this design. Addiction to social media raises distinctive ethical concerns because it harms users in a manner that is both demeaning and exploitative.

6.1. Addiction as Design Feature rather than Side Effect

Platform features—infinite scroll, variable reward schedules, algorithmic personalisation, and the continuous promise of social recognition—exploit cognitive and affective vulnerabilities to maximise time-on-platform. These design choices are not accidental; they are integral to the extraction of attention and the generation of engagement data.

6.2. The Moral Specificity of Social Media Addiction

Unlike addiction to substances such as alcohol or tobacco, social media addiction operates through the continuous modulation of social recognition, identity performance, and affective states. The harm is therefore simultaneously psychological, social, and political: it diminishes the capacity for sustained attention, critical reflection, and collective deliberation.

6.3. Authorship, Credit, and Racialised Inequality on TikTok

Zari Taylor’s analysis of TikTok reveals how the platform’s affordances—particularly the For You Page algorithm, sound pages, and caption practices—shape authorship and the distribution of credit. Black creators have repeatedly staged strikes to protest the suppression of their content and the lack of recognition for trends they originated. Informal practices of “Dance Credit” or “Idea Credit” emerge as imperfect responses to systemic ambiguity. The algorithmic organisation of attention is thus inseparable from questions of racial justice and cultural appropriation.

6.4. Public Engagement within the Attention Economy

Anna Chitwood’s examination of archaeological social media illustrates the practical challenges faced by those who attempt to use short-form platforms for educational and public-facing purposes. Creators must navigate engagement bait, clickbait dynamics, and the constant pressure to retain attention while trying to convey substantive knowledge. The tension between educational intentionality and algorithmic demand recapitulates, in microcosm, the larger conflict between critical montage and continuous stimulation.

7. The Politics of Digital Attention: Continuities, Ruptures, and Critical Stakes

The final analytical section synthesises the preceding arguments and situates them within a broader political critique. Eisenstein’s montage was explicitly oriented toward the production of revolutionary consciousness and the forging of collective perception. Algorithmic montage is oriented toward the continuous capture and monetisation of attention, the clustering of publics, and the extraction of rents. The formal continuity of collision and juxtaposition masks a profound political rupture.

7.1. Depoliticisation of Formal Power

The techniques that once served ideological construction now serve engagement optimisation. Collision produces affective intensity, memetic recognition, or momentary amusement rather than dialectical insight. The spectator is addressed as a source of data and attention rather than as a political subject capable of critical synthesis. Formal power persists; political intentionality is largely evacuated.

7.2. Fragmentation versus Collectivity

Where Eisenstein sought to forge collective identification through montage, algorithmic systems produce clustered publics whose commonalities are statistical rather than solidaristic. The possibility of a shared critical public sphere is undermined by the very mechanisms that organise attention with unprecedented efficiency. Collectivity is simulated as interest clustering while genuine collective agency is constrained.

7.3. Authorship, Credit, and the Politics of Visibility

The ambiguity of credit on TikTok, the racialised dynamics of trend appropriation, and the unequal distribution of visibility demonstrate that the politics of digital attention are inseparable from questions of authorship and cultural power. Montage is no longer solely a formal technique; it is also a terrain on which struggles over recognition and attribution are waged.

7.4. Critical Recovery of Montage Principles

A critical response to the attention economy may involve the deliberate recovery of montage as an intentional, reflective, and potentially oppositional practice. Creators and audiences who reclaim the dialectical potential of juxtaposition—using rapid sequencing to generate critique, historical consciousness, or alternative forms of collectivity rather than mere stimulation can contest the dominant logics of algorithmic capture. Such practices remain marginal and precarious, yet they constitute an important site of formal and political resistance.

7.5. Broader Cultural and Ideological Stakes

The politics of digital attention ultimately concerns the organisation of perception itself. Platforms that control the sequencing of experience exercise power over the conditions under which meaning is produced, publics are assembled, and agency is exercised. Recovering the theoretical resources of Eisensteinian montage—its emphasis on collision, synthesis, metaphor, and the relation between collective and individual—provides one indispensable means of analysing and contesting that power.

Conclusion

This assignment has traced the trajectory from Eisenstein’s theory of montage as dialectical collision and metaphorical production to the algorithmic sequencing of attention on contemporary short-video platforms. The seven analytical sections have demonstrated both formal continuities and decisive political, economic, and ethical ruptures. Metric, rhythmic, and intellectual principles reappear in short-form video, yet they are subordinated to the imperatives of engagement, data extraction, and rent generation. Networked publics give way to interest clusters; influencer charisma yields to modular data attraction; the ethics of addiction become inseparable from the political problem of captured attention; and struggles over credit and visibility reveal the racialised and gendered dimensions of algorithmic power.

The research question is answered by recognising that algorithmic feeds operationalise a depoliticised intensification of montage. The hypothesis is confirmed: the revolutionary technique of ideological construction has been converted into an instrument of continuous attention capture, the fragmentation of publics into interest clusters, and the uneven distribution of visibility and authorship. The broader critical significance of this argument lies in its insistence that formal analysis of media remains indispensable to political critique. Without understanding how discrete units of experience are collided, sequenced, measured, and monetised, it is impossible to grasp the contemporary organisation of attention and its consequences for collective life, democratic agency, and cultural justice. Recovering the dialectical, metaphorical, and collective potential of montage offers one pathway toward a more critical and resistant engagement with the attention economy.

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