Attention constitutes reality differently for different perceivers

Evidence

THERE ARE MORE reasons to deepen attention than simply resisting the attention economy. Those reasons have to do with the very real ways in which attention-what we pay attention to and what we do not-renders our reality in a very serious sense. From the same set of “data,” we draw conclusions based on our past experiences and assumptions. In her piece on the Prejudice Lab, Nordell speaks with Evelyn R. Carter, a social psychologist at UCLA, who tells her that “people in the majority and the minority often see two different realities” based on what they do and do not notice. For example, “[w]hite people…might only hear a racist remark, while people of color might register subtler actions, like someone scooting away slightly on the bus” Thinking about the idea of rendering, I sometimes borrow from my experience with (literal, computational) rendering. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 422

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Establishes the core thesis that attention renders reality — the key concept the whole book hinges on.
• XREF: Ties into the reader’s own interest in ‘awareness’ as what you notice vs. don’t — parallels Milgrom’s point that institutions fill knowledge gaps about others’ honesty; also echoes the reader’s focus on selective attention.

Related

• Attention actively constitutes reality, not merely reacts to it (similarity 0.95)
• Perceived speed depends on the observer’s own chosen scale of measurement (similarity 0.90)
• Attention is the faculty by which we constitute social and ethical reality (similarity 0.84)
• Patterns of attention determine what reality feels possible to us. (similarity 0.82)
• Attention patterns constitute reality and are contagious between people. (similarity 0.82)
• Hidden biases can be corrected by training attention, not by adjusting conditions (similarity 0.81)
• Attention constitutes reality and remaking it remakes the self (similarity 0.80)
• Most people equate attention with screen-based task focus (similarity 0.80)
• Shifting one’s attention can change the kind of world one moves and acts in (similarity 0.80)
• The attention economy treats attention as uniform when its quality is secretly variable (similarity 0.79)
• Attention can be deliberately wielded, not just reclaimed (similarity 0.79)
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. (similarity 0.79)
• People can pay attention to something while being unaware they are attending to it (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is the substrate of care for self, community, and planet. (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone (similarity 0.79)