Attention is an activity that forms persons, not a resource that platforms act upon

Evidence

Overall, the approach to the anthropological study of attention that we have outlined in this article is in keeping with Miller and colleagues’ “critical take on all attempts to declare that The Internet has done this or that to young people, memory, attention span, or whatever” (Miller 2016, emphasis added). Thus, we have argued, attention is not a thing that something is “done to.” Rather, attention “does something” to—or by—someone. We do not mean that attention is an unlimited resource that one can “freely use” to “manage” whatever issues one needs. To claim so would commit the vulgar functionalistic mistake of the “social imaginaries” approach, where virtually every symbolic form or cultural phenomenon is assumed to serve a collective or individual “purpose” (Sneath et al. 2009, Pedersen 2011). Rather, as we have argued over the preceding pages via targeted readings across the anthropological literature on digital and religious worlds,attention as techne plays a crucial role in the sociocognitive and intersubjective processes through which human beings are made into certain kinds of persons and subjects. Even if it does not have the power to determine to what end and what effect, attention has the capacity to make us turn our minds and bodies to something and thus away from something else. — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 68

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines attention as techne: an intersubjective practice that constitutes subjects, contrasted with both techno-determinism and functionalist ‘social imaginaries’.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s attention-surveillance literature: this anthropological framing of attention-as-forming-subjects complements but complicates economized ‘attention economy’ accounts. — connects to: Attention enables individuals to become themselves, not merely survive — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 486; Attention is an interactive relation to one’s life-sustaining environment, not a resource — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 86; Attention is a vector, not a scalar, because it aims beyond itself — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 238 (+8 more)

Related

• Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource (similarity 0.89)
• Anthropology has studied attention mostly implicitly, not as an explicit topic (similarity 0.88)
• Attention is an interactive relation to one’s life-sustaining environment, not a resource (similarity 0.88)
• Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one. (similarity 0.87)
• Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle (similarity 0.87)
• Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. (similarity 0.87)
• Attention enables individuals to become themselves, not merely survive (similarity 0.86)
• Attention can be anthropologically theorized as either technologies or techniques (similarity 0.85)
• Attention is a fundamental life resource, not a discretionary commodity. (similarity 0.85)
• Attention is the scarce resource that powers the information economy. (similarity 0.84)
• Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production (similarity 0.84)
• Attention is a shared common resource, not private property. (similarity 0.84)
• Attention now functions like money as a common metric for cultural value. (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is the fundamental medium of all human connection (similarity 0.83)
• Attention’s slipperiness itself makes it a subject for ethnographic study. (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Attention is a fundamental life resource, not a discretionary commodity. #contradicts (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 104
• Attention can be deliberately wielded, not just reclaimed #qualifies (0.75)
• Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource #expands (0.75) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 26
• Attention functions as the ground for ethics, not merely for personal satisfaction. #expands (0.72) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 375