Hyper-individualized attention ironically enslaves people to media rather than freeing them

Evidence

The past half century has been an age of unprecedented individualism, allowing us to live in all sorts of ways that were not possible before. The power we have been given to construct our attentional lives is an underappreciated example. Even while waiting for the dentist, we have the world at our finger tips: we can check mail, browse our favorite sites, play games, and watch movies, where once we had to content ourselves with a stack of old magazines. But with the new horizon of possibilities has also come the erosion of private life’s perimeter. And so it is a bit of a paradox that in having so thoroughly individualized our attentional lives we should wind up being less ourselves and more in thrall to our various media and devices. Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1139

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together — technology offers control of attention yet deepens dependence and isolation. — connects to: The imagined audience can paralyze users’ participation in social media. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 597; Individual choice does not precede but follows collective media enthralments. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 100; Marcuse saw mass media as absorbing individual thought into indoctrination — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 542 (+9 more)
• STORYSTEM: The paradox — total individual control of attention yielding greater thrall — is a generative premise for a character whose freedom to curate any distraction gradually erases selfhood.

Broader Connections

• Exploiting attention is experienced as exploitation of the person themselves #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 73
• Personalized internet feeds destroyed shared common knowledge and split the public into oppositional realities #expands (0.85)
• Self-commodification in the attention economy creates an escalating spiral of exposure and attack #expands (0.78) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 207
• Shared attention builds a collective rather than merely private reality #complicates (0.70) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 121