Attention theory shifted from passive submission to active investment around 1750

Evidence

Even if, as we have already highlighted, the history of the theories of individual attention remains largely to be written, it would seem that we can identify two major scansions situated in the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Where Locke and the sensualist tradition produced subjects conceived of as wax tablets, obliged to ‘submit’ to the impressions of sensory stimuli, philosophical and scientific works published after 1750 (and, to an even greater extent, Romanticism) largely thought of attention as something that individuals actively ‘give’ to this or that object in their environment – on the model of an investor who directs his capital towards this or that promising enterprise. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 357

Categorization

• XREF: The economic ‘investment’ model of attention directly prefigures contemporary attention-economy framings; connects to the reader’s platform/surveillance focus. — connects to: The attention industry did not exist a century ago — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 14
• SEED: The wax-tablet to investor-capital shift is a clean historical arc for an essay on how metaphors of attention track economic modes of production.