Modern ‘attention’ is a narrowed, instrumentalized construct far removed from lived human attention.

Evidence

Over the past century or so, a VAST RANGE OF HUMAN FACULTIES AND EXPERIENCES has been effectively collapsed into a single, narrow, cybernetic (i.e., machine-engaged), quantifiable, and ultimately always-already-instrumentalized THING—a thing we CALL “attention,” and worry about as “attention,” but that has as little to do with the true cosmos of human attention as a sex-ed class has to do with human love. Which is to say, not nothing. But not that much, either. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 122

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Core diagnostic distinction between the cybernetic construct called ‘attention’ and the lived reality of human attention.
• XREF: The sex-ed/love analogy parallels critiques of quantified self-tracking (e.g., Gary Wolf’s Quantified Self criticism by scholars like Natasha Dow Schull).
• SEED: Angle: how the modern ‘attention’ concept is a category error with a specific genealogy — candidate for an essay tracing the term’s lab origins.

Related

• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. (similarity 0.93)
• Attention science defined attention as visual, durational, and cybernetic to fit its funders’ tools (similarity 0.85)
• Attention, not networks or devices, is the true substrate of all connection. (similarity 0.84)
• Attention is the fundamental medium of all human connection (similarity 0.83)
• Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start. (similarity 0.83)
• Most people equate attention with screen-based task focus (similarity 0.83)
• Attention can be defined beyond action and receptivity (similarity 0.82)
• Attention research was canalized into a visual, durational, cybernetic paradigm by its industry funders. (similarity 0.82)
• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era (similarity 0.82)
• Attention is a vector, not a scalar, because it aims beyond itself (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is the substrate of care for self, community, and planet. (similarity 0.81)
• Recovering the cybernetic version of attention would only refit people for task-selection (similarity 0.81)
• Attensity is a reclaimed scientific term for direct study of attention itself (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is the mind’s selective possession of one focus amid several possible ones. (similarity 0.81)
• Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone (similarity 0.81)