Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally.

Evidence

There is no doubt, then, that the ever-increasing digitization and datafication of everyday life across the world (Douglas-Jones et al. 2021, Knox & Nafus 2018, Walford 2017) is transforming attentional practices, forcing researchers to see beyond smartphones and computers not only as mere media devices, but also as part of infrastructural networks that attract and capture attention for political, economic, or social ends. Yet as is also evident from the many current discourses around attention pertaining to new digital technologies as studied by anthropologists, human attention has long been considered valuable and thus something to be cared for and protected as well as controlled and manipulated. Attentional technologies, including digital ones, should not be the only focus of an anthropology of attention. — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 43

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s platform/surveillance survey — the claim that digital attention capture has deep historical precursors in regimes of control and care. — connects to: Attention management predates modernity and originates in classical rhetoric. — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 5; Office computers with fast connections created a vast new attention harvest — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 897; Attention can be deliberately wielded, not just reclaimed (+2 more)
• CANDY: A compact framing insight: attention as long-managed resource, not a digital invention.

Related

• The attention economy predates digital technology by 150 years (similarity 0.87)
• Attention is an activity that forms persons, not a resource that platforms act upon (similarity 0.87)
• Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle (similarity 0.87)
• Attention management predates modernity and originates in classical rhetoric. (similarity 0.86)
• Anthropology has studied attention mostly implicitly, not as an explicit topic (similarity 0.86)
• Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource (similarity 0.86)
• Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one. (similarity 0.85)
• Digital technologies replace human attentional energy with electrical energy. (similarity 0.85)
• Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production (similarity 0.85)
• The attention industry did not exist a century ago (similarity 0.84)
• Attention functions as a political economy embedded in specific temporal contexts (similarity 0.84)
• Attention is the scarce resource that powers the information economy. (similarity 0.83)
• Attention’s slipperiness itself makes it a subject for ethnographic study. (similarity 0.83)
• Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given (similarity 0.83)
• Attention now functions like money as a common metric for cultural value. (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Attention scarcity plagued writers and scholars centuries before digital media #exemplifies (0.95) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 53
• Attention can be deliberately wielded, not just reclaimed #corroborates (0.90)
• The attention economy predates digital technology by 150 years #expands (0.90) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 62