Attention’s slipperiness itself makes it a subject for ethnographic study.

Evidence

The very fact that attention is slippery, a topic of widespread cultural concern, makes it ripe for critical ethnographic scrutiny. Bracketing the thorny question of what attention is as a matter of fact, we are interested in how attention has emerged as a matter of concern in Latour’s (2004) sense: as a phenomenon or an artifact of contemporary economic culture ascribed great importance across many scales at once. Attention is ubiquitous and variable, appearing in an ever-growing range of contexts. As the floating signifier of the digital age par excellence, it seems that there is no popular issue that can avoid being framed in attentional terms. This state of affairs demands anthropological investigation. — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 13

Categorization

• XREF: Defining attention as a ‘matter of concern’ (Latour) vs. ‘matter of fact’ echoes the reader’s platform/surveillance work on how attention economies are constituted discursively. — connects to: Attention can be anthropologically theorized as either technologies or techniques — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 63
• DEFINE: Latour’s matter-of-concern framing is being mobilized as an analytic stance toward attention.
• SEED: A possible angle: ‘the floating signifier of the digital age’ as empirical datum — tracking how ‘attentional framing’ colonizes otherwise-distinct issues.

Related

• Anthropology has studied attention mostly implicitly, not as an explicit topic (similarity 0.85)
• Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is an activity that forms persons, not a resource that platforms act upon (similarity 0.83)
• Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle (similarity 0.83)
• Attention can be anthropologically theorized as either technologies or techniques (similarity 0.82)
• Attention functions as a political economy embedded in specific temporal contexts (similarity 0.81)
• Anthropologists themselves operate within political economies of attention. (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource (similarity 0.80)
• Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given (similarity 0.80)
• Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one. (similarity 0.80)
• Attention now functions like money as a common metric for cultural value. (similarity 0.80)
• Attention-economy analysis must be reframed within a broader attention ecosophy (similarity 0.79)
• Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line) — The Political Economy of Attention (similarity 0.79)
• Debates about attention are ultimately ontological, not political (similarity 0.79)
• The line between forced and free attention is itself a political question needing investigation (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Attention can be anthropologically theorized as either technologies or techniques #expands (0.80) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 63