A century of individualism plus devices destroyed collective shared attention

Evidence

It is a core conviction of our movement that collective experiences of authentically shared attention have been actively compromised by the drift to ever more individualized structures of daily life, labor, and leisure. Sociologists and anthropologists and economists who study the human dynamics of the modern era all agree: We have been living across a full century now of ever-more-dominant individualism. Most people, in most of the developed world, have, today, much weaker ties to others (family, neighbors, friends, coworkers) than would have felt normal to their great-grandparents. We break bread together less, worship together less, engage in civic activities, clubs, and recreational communities with others less than ever. And the time we do spend with others, today, is pervasively permeated by our devices—which continuously pull each and every person (child, adult, grandmother) away from IRL presence and active intersubjectivity and toward the screen-silos that separate each from each upon the surface of the good Earth. We have been scattered and isolated in this actual world, even as we have been thrown together in a new and simulacral tumbler, where, like pebbles worn smooth in a slurry of grit, we are ground down and ground up. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 315

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘ground down in a simulacral tumbler’ image dovetails with the human-fracking thesis and with earlier note-taking on how infrastructure shapes shared attention.
• QUESTION: The claim about sociologists agreeing across a full century of dominant individualism deserves factual checking—it is asserted rather than documented.