The Attention Heist: How Platforms Rewrite Time

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication[1]' and ‘the media scenario[2]' and develops a theory of time as the hidden infrastructure of contemporary mass communication, arguing that the ‘new paradigm’ is best understood as the industrial production and governance of temporality through narrative form. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s account of narrativity, emplotment, and the ‘third time’ of narrated experience, the article proposes that media do not merely represent events but configure how societies inhabit ‘before’ and ‘after’, urgency and delay, memory and expectation. In this framework, narrative causality is practical rather than physical: media plots translate motives, goals, and collective intentions into intelligible sequences, converting contingent occurrences into purposeful arcs. The concept of the ‘media scenario’ is introduced to name the contemporary form of this process: an environment in which platforms, formats, and algorithms continuously script attention, pace public emotions, and synchronise dispersed audiences into a shared ‘now’. News cycles, serial formats, viral controversies, strategic communication, and scenario-planning narratives are treated as techniques for abducting attention and stabilising a hypernormalised present, where participation matters more than belief and visibility competes with verification. The article argues that this engineered temporality intensifies polarisation by rewarding dramatic simplification and accelerating moral response, but it also identifies a constructive possibility: narrative literacy as civic capacity, enabling societies to recognise the time-making power of media, resist compulsory dramaturgy, and re-open public time to deliberation, plurality, and ethical agency.