Attention is alignment, the same faculty on individual and collective levels
Evidence
IF WE THINK about what it means to “concentrate” or “pay attention” at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignment for a “movement” to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 296
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Precisely defines attention as alignment, the load-bearing concept for the chapter.
Related
- Attention is the alignment that makes both individual and collective action possible (similarity 0.96)
- Attentional alignment with others generates communal powers no individual could reach alone (similarity 0.80)
- Attention is the faculty by which we constitute social and ethical reality (similarity 0.80)
- Attention is not an organ or substance but a dynamic state of cognitive unison (similarity 0.79)
- Attention patterns constitute reality and are contagious between people. (similarity 0.79)
- Individual attention selection spontaneously aligns people into shared communities of sensibility (similarity 0.79)
- Attention defies any single fixed definition and demands continual restlessness. (similarity 0.78)
- Attention can be deliberately wielded, not just reclaimed (similarity 0.78)
- Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start. (similarity 0.78)