Attention scarcity can be turned into an asset through redistributed attention
Evidence
Everything seems to begin with a problem of attention economy: the psychoanalyst would suffer an unbearable attention overload if he had to continue to concentrate on what his patients want to tell him for eight hours a day. This is truly a case of what is often denounced today as an insufficiency of attention capacity for the tasks that need doing. This lack of resources is however transformed into an asset (less is more), holding out the promise of an EMANCIPATORY DISTRACTION: if we cannot be attentive enough, let us be attentive differently – and make our distraction into an opportunity for a detachment which, freeing us from our voluntarist blinkers, will allow us to reconsider the problem in an entirely new way. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 337
Categorization
- XREF: Recasts the attention economy’s ‘scarcity’ framing — connects to Wu’s ‘Attention Merchants’ and the broader attention economy discourse the reader is bridging. — connects to: Information abundance creates a scarcity of attention — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 7; Human serial attention limits make attention the scarce resource — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 137; Attention is a scarce resource drained by information overload — Thomas Davenport & John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding…, 17 (+4 more)
- SEED: Angle: the ‘less is more’ move — how the same scarcity economists decry as resource shortfall was reframed by Freud as the cure’s enabling condition. Could anchor an essay on redescribing platform-driven distraction as productive.
Broader Connections
- Information abundance creates a scarcity of attention
#expands(0.85) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 7 - Human serial attention limits make attention the scarce resource
#exemplifies(0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 137 - Attention is a scarce resource drained by information overload
#exemplifies(0.72) — Thomas Davenport & John Beck, The Attention Economy, 17