Attention scarcity plagued writers and scholars centuries before digital media

Evidence

The actors who endeavour to attract punters by acting out a scene from their show in the streets of Avignon are only reinventing the practice of ‘parade’, which had already been cultivated and refined by troupes promoting their shows at the fairs of the Ancien Régime. Ann Blair has recently shown that it was under pressure from informational overload that the Renaissance humanists and the philosophers of the seventeenth century developed measures relating to the book (tables of contents, indexes, references) and epistemology (Descartes’s ‘method’) so that they could orientate themselves in the overabundance of texts, in which they already feared they may drown. And it is not a third millennium satirist commenting on the six hundred books of the literary season, but the writer Charles Tiphaigne de La Roche in 1760, who wondered ‘how to break through the crowd’ and ‘how to attract attention’ when ‘everyone has started writing and it is easier to find an author than a reader’. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 53

Categorization

• XREF: Ann Blair’s ‘Too Much to Know’ on Renaissance information overload is a natural companion reading, and Charles Tiphaigne de La Roche in 1760 anticipates our modern ‘everyone has started writing’ complaints. — connects to: The attention economy predates digital technology by 150 years — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 62; The attention industry did not exist a century ago — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 14; Attention management predates modernity and originates in classical rhetoric. — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 5 (+4 more)
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The attention economy is not new — what actually was new in 1996?’ tracing how pre-digital writers from 1760 to the Renaissance handled the same scarcity via index, commonplacing, and parading.

Broader Connections

• The attention economy predates digital technology by 150 years #corroborates (0.92) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 62
• Attention management predates modernity and originates in classical rhetoric. #expands (0.88) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 5
• Rhetoric and style have served as attention-capture disciplines for millennia #expands (0.85)
• The attention industry did not exist a century ago #contradicts (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 14