Modern scattered attention inverts monastic cultivation of deep focus

Evidence

How often have you sat down with a plan, say, to write an email or buy one thing online, only to find yourself, hours later, wondering what happened? And what are the costs to a society of an entire population conditioned to spend so much of their waking lives not in concentration and focus but rather in fragmentary awareness and subject to constant interruption? In this respect our lives have become the very opposite of those cultivated by the monastics, whether in the East or the West, whose aim was precisely to reap the fruits of deep and concentrated attention. What an irony it is that the lamentably scattered state of mind arises not from our own lack of drive but rather from the imperatives of one peculiar kind of commercial enterprise that is not even particularly profitable much of the time. The rest of the private sector may well have as much cause for complaint as the individual and society. It would no doubt be shocking to reckon the macroeconomic price of all our time spent with the attention merchants, if only to alert us to the drag on our own productivity quotient, the economist’s measure of all our efforts. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1142

Categorization

• XREF: The monastic contrast recalls the earlier chapter on the Catholic church’s early attention economics and its division of time. — connects to: Attention in aesthetic experience historically derives from prayer — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 436; Attention ecology requires modulating between deep and distributed focus. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 425; A generational shift from deep attention to hyper-attention is underway — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 46
• QUESTION: The claim that the attention industry is ‘not even particularly profitable much of the time’ deserves probing — it seems to undercut the whole book’s premise that attention is the raw material of enormous wealth.
• SEED: A macroeconomic estimate of attention-harvesting’s drag on productivity could make a strong data-driven essay: what does society actually lose to fragmentary awareness?

Broader Connections

• Attention ecology requires modulating between deep and distributed focus. #expands (0.82) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 425
• A generational shift from deep attention to hyper-attention is underway #corroborates (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 46