Industrial attention farming displaced diverse attentional modalities with one mechanomorphic species

Evidence

Every time we think about our attention we should remember those prairies—and the monocultures that have replaced them. Because the attentional world we navigate today is monocultural: What we talk about when we talk about “attention” is, in fact, just one very narrow and specific (if also, now, totally dominant) species. It is the kind of attention that has been cultivated by a century of industrial “attention farming,” and we hardly remember all the other attentional modalities that it has displaced. Which attention has carpeted our landscape? The mechanomorphic, instrumentalized, stimulus-and-response kind of attention that became the central preoccupation of the military-industrial complex across the twentieth century. The kind of attention that focused on screen-vigilance (key for radar monitors and the monotonous labor of regulating machines), and the tap-click incorporation of human beings into cybernetic systems (key for shooting down enemy craft, or making timed decisions in complex models). This was the kind of attention studied in laboratories, quantified by advertisers, and now optimized by AI-driven search engine algorithms. And it is the kind of attention too many of us find ourselves trying to defend, or improve, or manage in our daily lives. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 488

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pins down the monoculture metaphor central to the manifesto’s diagnosis — the dominant attention is a cultivated, not natural, species.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s zero-decibel/silence reading line, which also traces instrumentalized attention to military-industrial imperatives. — connects to: The attention economy functions as an industrial farm of vegetative users — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 83; Seeing the farm as a factory erases living interdependence from perception — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 541; Attention is diverse cognitive engagement, not narrow focus — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 496 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The attention economy functions as an industrial farm of vegetative users #expands (0.95) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 83
• Attention is diverse cognitive engagement, not narrow focus #contradicts (0.85) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 496
• The attention economy treats attention as uniform when its quality is secretly variable #expands (0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 345
• Seeing the farm as a factory erases living interdependence from perception #expands (0.80) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 541
• Screen culture trains us to misperceive attention as singular and task-oriented #expands (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 204
• Self-production for attention substitutes for and erodes genuine social community. #complicates (0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 100