Laboratory attention research served military and advertising ends.
Evidence
The human frackers are exploiting one very particular kind of attention, one that comes out of a century-old system of laboratory research, which studied attention for specific and narrow purposes (i.e., military performance, advertising, factory productivity). But there is much more to human attention than that. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 120
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Connects to the broader ‘human fracking’ argument and to critiques of attention measurement being purpose-built for industrial extraction, echoing themes from Deep Listening and soundscape studies.
Related
- Industrial attention research served military, advertising, and factory needs only (similarity 0.91)
- Attention can be quantitatively measured and thereby bought and sold. (similarity 0.85)
- Attention extraction is a historical contingent result of human choice (similarity 0.84)
- Attention research was canalized into a visual, durational, cybernetic paradigm by its industry funders. (similarity 0.84)
- Attention science never actually studied lived experience, only task performance. (similarity 0.84)
- Twentieth-century attention research served machine-monitoring practical ends. (similarity 0.83)
- Human attention is being extracted and commodified by an industrial-technological complex. (similarity 0.83)
- Modern attention science was forged as a military-industrial discipline (similarity 0.81)
- An industry has channeled and commodified human attention like fracking extracts natural resources. (similarity 0.81)
- Attention science defined attention as visual, durational, and cybernetic to fit its funders’ tools (similarity 0.81)
- The science of attention was shaped by military-industrial funding imperatives. (similarity 0.81)
- Attention was studied in deep ways before military deoxygenation experiments standardized it (similarity 0.81)
- Industrial tech companies extract and commodify human attention like fracking extracts oil (similarity 0.81)
- The dispute over attention is ultimately an argument about what constitutes our humanity (similarity 0.81)
- Human fracking parallels industrial extraction of physical labor (similarity 0.81)