Today’s attention choices shape the devices that will condition tomorrow’s attention

Evidence

Across the attention interface, it is as true to say that technogenesis conditions synaptogenesis (as is rightly maintained by Nicholas Carr and the declinists) as it is to say that synaptogenesis, itself guided by our social practices and our ethico-political biases, conditions technogenesis (something that is noted much less often). So, the dynamics of unison, counterpoint and polyphony determining the play of echoes between our different activities take place within a more general TECHNOGENETIC ATTENTION whose dynamic comes to determine any attention echology: the materiality of the devices that will condition our attention tomorrow depends on the way in which our attention today selects certain properties offered by the devices produced yesterday. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 533

Categorization

• XREF: The bidirectional technogenesis claim frames the whole book’s key synthesis: we are not passive victims of device design, but co-selectors of it — so attentional politics is genuinely political. — connects to: Smartphone screens monopolize attention formation toward a single engineered kind — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 201; Attention selects which technical developments get pursued, forming a recursive loop with the brain — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 532; Attention extraction is a historical contingent result of human choice — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 190
• DEEPTHINKING: The double arrow — tech conditions brain, brain-guided-attention conditions tech — undermines both pure determinism and pure voluntarism, leaving agency distributed across a loop. Dense enough to sit with.
• SEED: Angles: ‘Attention is the ballot’ — reframing attention ethics as a form of political selection on the future material infrastructure.

Broader Connections

• Attention selects which technical developments get pursued, forming a recursive loop with the brain #expands (0.82) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 532
• Attention extraction is a historical contingent result of human choice #corroborates (0.80) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 190
• Smartphone screens monopolize attention formation toward a single engineered kind #expands (0.78) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 201