Attention always responds to something else and never rests still.

Evidence

This regime currently governs the way in which the mass media attune us to the world: ‘The posture of permanent alertness we are made to adopt, where stock market prices provide the best example, makes any attentive development impossible over the long-term, because it is ‘alert attention’ that dominates, provoking and awakening without let up, without us ultimately being able to get a handle on it.’ This domination tends, however, to rapidly exhaust the wellspring of its functioning – too much alertness kills alertness: ‘This alertness regime is today faced with a generalized channel-hopping and an “underlying reduction of the level of attention following an event”, which undermines its foundations.’ — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 127 (#complicates, via linked claim)

IT’S HERE THAT I want to come back to the relationship between discipline and attention from the previous chapter. An element of effort and straining exists in the word attention itself, which comes from Latin ad + tendere, “to stretch toward.” This relationship finds one of its most compelling expressions in William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology. Defining attention as the ability to hold something before the mind, James observes that the inclination of attention is toward fleetingness. … Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before the kind with ease. This strain of attention is the fundamental act of will. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 396 (#expands, via linked claim)

The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away. … If, as I’ve said, attention is a state of openness that assumes there is something new to be seen, it is also true that this state must resist our tendency to declare our observations finished—to be done with it. For James as for von Helmholtz, this means that there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention. Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 397 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Attention is fundamentally alienated because it is always directed at something else. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 509; Permanent alertness exhausts itself by killing sustained attention — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 127; Sustained attention is a series of willed returns, not a steady state — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 396 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Permanent alertness exhausts itself by killing sustained attention #complicates (0.82) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 127
• Sustained attention is a series of willed returns, not a steady state #expands (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 396
• There is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention, only repeated returns #corroborates (0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 397
• Reflexive attention takes another person’s attention as its own object. #exemplifies (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 466
• Sustained attention inevitably yields awareness of complicity and responsibility #expands (0.72) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 41
• Attention is a currency that is always being spent and cannot be saved #qualifies (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 63
• Genuine attention is centripetal distraction, bending thoughts back #qualifies (0.72) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 503