Human attention has been reduced to a monoculture like American farmland

Evidence

There are deep ways, too, that our work parallels the forms of transformative restoration that have actually helped our natural spaces recover from misuse. For instance, aspects of our movement can be likened to the work of bio-prospectors, seed collectors, and restoration ecologists—folks who have been on the lookout for rare, unusual, or marginalized species, and who seek to recultivate natural environments that have been erased. After all, what has happened to human attention over the last century is exactly what has happened to the prairielands of America: a monoculture. … Nearly half a billion acres of this country are pure monoculture, an area representing something like the whole state of Arizona…six times over. Those regions represent unrelenting miles of just one thing, stretching to the horizon—soybean, wheat, or, mostly, corn. But there is nothing “natural” about all this. Once upon a time, those monocultured farmlands teemed with more than a hundred different wild grasses, forbs, and sedges—tallgrass and shortgrass prairies so vast that early European explorers thought they had come upon an actual ocean of meadow, full of species never before encountered. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 486

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The ‘botanist-Martian dropped into middle America’ vividly dramatizes monoculture — a usable science-fiction frame for an essay or story about diagnosing attention poverty.
• XREF: connects to: Monoculture-like attention-economy communities are more vulnerable to takeover than diverse ones — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 514; The dominant monocultural attention is mistaken for attention itself. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 489; An attention economy requires reducing diverse attention to one quantifiable substance. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 228 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The dominant monocultural attention is mistaken for attention itself. #expands (0.90) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 489
• The prairie-to-monoculture story is the template for what industrial attention farming did. #expands (0.85) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 488
• Monoculture-like attention-economy communities are more vulnerable to takeover than diverse ones #expands (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 514
• An attention economy requires reducing diverse attention to one quantifiable substance. #expands (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 228
• The attention economy functions as an industrial farm of vegetative users #responds-to (0.75) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 83
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. #qualifies (0.75) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 122
• American cultural dominance persists while older Western cultural powers decline #exemplifies (0.70) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 36