The line between forced and free attention is itself a political question needing investigation

Evidence

Perhaps the negotiation of what is a coercive, externally imposed attentional technology and an intentional liberating technique—the “fluctuating tension between attentional activity and differing forms of attentional pull” (Throop & Duranti 2015, p. 1056)—is what truly needs to be investigated. There is certainly the danger of overlooking the societal structures and cultural discourses surrounding often class-specific and racialized attentional ideologies and practices. — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 67

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes ‘attentional technologies’ (external, coercive) from ‘attentional techniques’ (internal, liberating) as an analytical distinction worth interrogating.
• SEED: Article angle: the politics of who gets to call what ‘distraction’ versus ‘focus’ — attentional ideologies as class-coded and racialized.
• XREF: connects to: Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 10; Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era; Deciding that something is unpolitical is itself a political act. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 1088

Related

• Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle (similarity 0.86)
• Anthropology has studied attention mostly implicitly, not as an explicit topic (similarity 0.82)
• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era (similarity 0.81)
• Attention can be anthropologically theorized as either technologies or techniques (similarity 0.81)
• Debates about attention are ultimately ontological, not political (similarity 0.81)
• Attention functions as a political economy embedded in specific temporal contexts (similarity 0.80)
• Attention is an activity that forms persons, not a resource that platforms act upon (similarity 0.79)
• Anthropologists themselves operate within political economies of attention. (similarity 0.79)
• Politics itself is being reshaped by attentional extraction industries (similarity 0.79)
• Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one. (similarity 0.78)
• Attention’s slipperiness itself makes it a subject for ethnographic study. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era #expands (0.85)
• Deciding that something is unpolitical is itself a political act. #expands (0.80) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1088