Collective distraction is a life-and-death matter, not merely unpleasantness

Evidence

I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention,” then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act. In Chapter 1, I mentioned Berardi’s distinction between connectivity and sensitivity in After the Future. It’s here that we see why this difference matters. For Berardi, the replacement of sensitivity with connectivity leads to a “social brain” that “appears unable to recompose, to find common strategies of behavior, incapable of common narration and of solidarity.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 297

Categorization

• XREF: Berardi’s connectivity-vs-sensitivity distinction, referenced from Chapter 1; connects to the reader’s standing interest in how surveillance/commercial attention capture maps back into Odell’s own framework. — connects to: Spectatorship itself becomes a life-or-death determinant — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 683
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 297