Attention science defined attention as visual, durational, and cybernetic to fit its funders’ tools

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

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: This is the authoritative unpacking of what ‘attention’ was made to mean: visual, durational, cybernetic — the three diagnostic features the manifesto’s whole critique drives against.
• XREF: Ties directly to Sean Parker/tech-confessional accounts and to the Deep Listening book on how sensory regimes get shaped by industrial context.

Related

• Attention research was canalized into a visual, durational, cybernetic paradigm by its industry funders. (similarity 0.93)
• The measured attention of lab science was defined by duration and person-machine coupling. (similarity 0.88)
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. (similarity 0.86)
• Modern ‘attention’ is a narrowed, instrumentalized construct far removed from lived human attention. (similarity 0.85)
• Industrial attention research served military, advertising, and factory needs only (similarity 0.85)
• Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start. (similarity 0.85)
• The modern concern over short attention spans inherits a military-industrial definition of attention (similarity 0.84)
• The ‘attention span’ concept is a historically recent, lab-derived construct. (similarity 0.84)
• Attention science never actually studied lived experience, only task performance. (similarity 0.83)
• Modern attention science was forged as a military-industrial discipline (similarity 0.83)
• Attention ecology is a surprisingly underinvestigated field needing new vocabulary (similarity 0.83)
• Most people equate attention with screen-based task focus (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is the fundamental medium of all human connection (similarity 0.82)
• The science of attention was shaped by military-industrial funding imperatives. (similarity 0.82)