Attention is the most personal possession yet exists only as something to be alienated

Evidence

Advertising, literature, artistic experimentation, television, on-line courses, credit agencies, search engines, live performance, militant gardening, political organizations: over the course of the following chapters, we will touch on all these areas. For each of them, we will try to understand better how our various environments condition our individual and collective attention, and how, from the moment we start to reconfigure these environments, we do retain a certain power over our own fate. In a certain way, our attention is the thing that is most particular to us. And yet, it is only available to us as something to be alienated – both in the capturing apparatuses in which we are immersed by consumer capitalism and in the aesthetic experiences into which we dive most passionately. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 20

Categorization

• XREF: The paradox of attention being ‘most particular to us’ yet inherently alienable resonates with Frankfurt School readings of commodified experience and with Stiegler’s ‘psychopower’ — also echoes the editor’s earlier book on attention economies. — connects to: Attention is fundamentally alienated because it is always directed at something else. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 509; Exploiting attention is experienced as exploitation of the person themselves — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 73
• DEFINE: Establishes a core paradox the book will unpack: attention as simultaneously the most intimate self and the site of capture by consumer apparatuses.

Broader Connections

• Exploiting attention is experienced as exploitation of the person themselves #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 73