Permanent alertness exhausts itself by killing sustained attention
Evidence
This regime currently governs the way in which the mass media attune us to the world: ‘The posture of permanent alertness we are made to adopt, where stock market prices provide the best example, makes any attentive development impossible over the long-term, because it is ‘alert attention’ that dominates, provoking and awakening without let up, without us ultimately being able to get a handle on it.’ This domination tends, however, to rapidly exhaust the wellspring of its functioning – too much alertness kills alertness: ‘This alertness regime is today faced with a generalized channel-hopping and an “underlying reduction of the level of attention following an event”, which undermines its foundations.’ — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 127
Categorization
- SEED: An essay angle: media’s alertness regime as self-undermining — the doomscrolling loop that wears out its own audience.
- XREF: Connects to Frankfurt School critiques of distraction and to the reader’s noise/signal work on information overload. — connects to: Constant mediatized interruption corrodes attention to others and to self — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 403; Attention always responds to something else and never rests still.; Intense attention can become immobilizing and bring one out of step with everyday life (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Intense attention can become immobilizing and bring one out of step with everyday life
#expands(0.75) - Focused attention necessarily amputates awareness of other stimuli
#expands(0.75) - The brain’s evolved vigilance actively forecloses the possibility of true silence
#expands(0.72) - Hyperactive vigilance reduces social life to mere survival
#expands(0.72) — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 37