Herding is constitutive of sociality and need not be moralized away.

Evidence

Anchoring the analysis in an awareness of our collective attention allows us to avoid the moralizing discourse which, from Pascal to the Frankfurt School, deplores the apparently hopeless effects of the temptations of ‘entertainment’ and its industries. On the one hand, it is difficult not to admit that humans, like sheep and certain fish, think for the most part in herds and shoals: we tend to look in the same direction as our fellows. This sheep-like behaviour leads to a whole series of irrational disruptions and inefficient configurations, as it organizes our behaviour around attractors that are stabilized in a partially chaotic way. We can express this phenomenon by way of a FORMAL PRINCIPLE OF COLLECTIVE ENTHRALMENT which summarizes the considerations of the preceding pages: human attention tends to fall on objects whose forms it recognizes, under the spellbinding influence of the direction taken by the attention of others. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 107

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges Frankfurt School’s critique of entertainment with a non-moralizing ecological reading — the reader’s stated goal. — connects to: Norms shaped by kin altruism and group solidarity are not necessarily moral norms. — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality: The…, 693; Economies of action are deliberately built to herd users along prescribed courses. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1087
• SEED: Potential essay angle: replacing the Frankfurt ‘weapons of mass distraction’ frame with an ecological, non-moralizing account of collective enthralment.

Broader Connections

• Norms shaped by kin altruism and group solidarity are not necessarily moral norms. #corroborates (0.85) — Nicolas Baumard, A mutualistic approach to morality, 693