Attention research was canalized into a visual, durational, cybernetic paradigm by its industry funders.

Evidence

A century of laboratory studies (funded by the advertising industry and the military-industrial complex) sought empirically to observe, measure, and quantify human attention. What they found, over time, was a kind of attention that could be measured and understood with the tools they had. This attention was all about how long a person could keep their eyes on a screen. That is to say, this attention was primarily visual, meaning the other senses got more or less lost in the shuffle. It was durational, meaning that it could be measured in numbers of seconds and minutes. It was cybernetic, meaning it was about the relationship between a person and a machine. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 156

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that the measured ‘attention’ of lab science is a constructed category, not attention generally — the diagnostic framework is built on this definition.
• XREF: The claim that an industry-funded research paradigm constructs its own object echoes Foucault’s critique of disciplinary knowledge and also Innis’s media-bias argument about what a medium rewards and measures.