Attention is diverse cognitive engagement, not narrow focus

Evidence

Attention Activists know the deeper truth that has been plowed under by the industrial combines of our attentional monoculture: attention isn’t that narrow, determinate, track-and-trigger “focus” that facilitates frictionless integration of humans and machines (and makes bank for the frackers). It literally is a lot more than that—it is many, many forms of cognitive engagement and sensory awareness; it is faith, love, and life! It is a vast and diverse jungle, not a single, highly engineered cash crop. The work of emancipating human attention from the harness of the frackers involves, among other things, again and again INSISTING on that diversity and complexity—on the range and richness of attentional forms. Otherwise we risk trying to “save” or “protect” what is, in effect, the problem. What could be more tragic and stupid than creating a “society for the conservation of GMO soybeans”? They’re doing fine! If Attention Activists slip unselfconsciously into working to “reclaim” the thin and always-already-instrumentalized form of attention centrally at stake in the attention economy, we will have missed the whole point. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 496

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines attention as a diverse jungle of cognitive forms as opposed to the frackers’ engineered monoculture.
• DEEPTHINKING: The warning against conserving ‘GMO soybeans’ — working to reclaim the already-instrumentalized form of attention — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting caution for anyone opposing the attention economy.
• XREF: connects to: Attention ecology requires modulating between deep and distributed focus. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 425; Attentional habits divide the world into meaningful figures and neglected ground — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 494; Attention is not an organ or substance but a dynamic state of cognitive unison — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 518 (+6 more)