Attention activism requires collectively building attention’s public meaning

Evidence

Let’s skip all that for now. There are other books you can pick up if you want to read those stories. What’s relevant for us, here, is examining the birth of “environmental activism” for lessons as we work to bring forth this new and urgently needed movement of ATTENTION ACTIVISM. Just as early conservationists, sportsmen, naturalists, and urban reformers, working for decades in different parts of the world, had to give shape and immediacy and even a kind of charisma to the notion of the “environment” (linking Romantic ideas of the wilderness to medical ideas about health and well-being, to scientific ideas about chemical and biological interconnectedness), so, too, it falls to those of us fighting the attention frackers to work together—and, when necessary, apart—to raise a thick, true, and instantly compelling conception of attention to collective consciousness. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels how the ‘immodesty’ essay traces how moral categories get socially constructed over time. — connects to: Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 10; Treating talk as self-display makes audiences dismiss activists as attention-seekers — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1034; Shared attentional practices are the movement’s only real resource
• SEED: The move of grafting movement-building lessons from environmentalism onto attention is a usable scaffolding for an essay.