The modern concern over short attention spans inherits a military-industrial definition of attention

Evidence

But here’s the point: When we fret, now, about our “attention span,” we are fretting about our attention in terms given to us by THIS research tradition. The very idea of an “attention span” in a durational sense was an exact outgrowth of such studies (actually, earlier in the twentieth century the notion of an “attention span” referred not to duration, but to the actual visual field in which a stimulus might appear—it was spatial). Is THAT the attention we are fighting to take back from the frackers? — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 133

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise reconstruction of the etymology of ‘attention span’: durational meaning is a twentieth-century outgrowth of cybernetic human-factors work; earlier it meant a spatial visual field.
• QUESTION: The book’s own challenge — ‘is THAT the attention we are fighting to take back?’ — is the crux test of whether anti-fracking activism is even fighting on its own terms or accepting the enemy’s measuring stick.