Highly skilled durational attention materially builds and maintains society’s infrastructure

Evidence

Josh’s absorption by the “puddle” is a testament to the unique forms of attention that create our physical environment. And he’s not alone. There are countless folks like him who are responsible for the skilled craft and labor that build our bridges, maintain our towns, and keep life-giving supplies moving back and forth across the country. Like…Mike, an arborist on the Missouri public works team who is responsible for the upkeep of over a thousand streetside trees across his county. Anyone with the privilege of riding shotgun as Mike cruises through town will learn to see public space in a new way: not in terms of schools and restaurants, or on-ramps and roundabouts, but in leaf-rot and deadwood, in the telltale “scales” on a red maple’s bark and in a tilting bole. … Engineer DeLay and folks like him are keepers of an attention that is durational, hypnotic, and, also, perfectly alert. Does anybody watch anything for as many consecutive hours as a locomotive engineer watches those tracks? Or as truckers watch the road? All the while, operating several tons of high-velocity heavy machinery? — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 399

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘Grafting & Growth’ article — Mike the arborist reading a town through leaf-rot and bark scales parallels the article’s core claim that trees-as-infrastructure require a specialized way of seeing. — connects to: Human fracking extracts attentional capacities as industry once extracted physical ones. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 458; Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 26; Education and knowledge are reified forms of accumulated attention — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 13 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Instantiation of the book’s Crafter/Operator category: attention trained on material systems, not screens.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Human fracking extracts attentional capacities as industry once extracted physical ones. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 458; Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 26; Education and knowledge are reified forms of accumulated attention — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 13 (+1 more)