Shared attention builds a collective rather than merely private reality

Evidence

If ‘I’ can only be attentive to something to the extent that we pay attention to it – and if collective attention must be considered primary with respect to any effort at individual attention – this is precisely because this common ground of clichés in perpetual reprocessing conditions my ability to identify the phenomena encountered in my environment. The attention economy is in truth fundamentally collectivist. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 121

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that attention is fundamentally collective, not individual, inverts the standard resource-scarcity frame of the attention economy — a genuine paradigm flip worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier social-capital material where trust and reputation are properties of groups, not individuals. — connects to: A sudden common spectacle can dissolve interpersonal conflict into ‘we’ experience; Interpreting others presupposes shared rationality and a common world. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 420; Shared reality is woven from irreducibly perspectival individual experience — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 988 (+27 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 121