Yves Citton — The Ecology of Attention

248 published claims from this book.

• A generational shift from deep attention to hyper-attention is underway
• A proper history of attention would overturn all established logic
• A secretive collective undertakes ritualized attentional performances
• A vectoralist class profits solely by moving and commodifying information.
• Advertising budgets, not product merit, determine what consumers buy
• Aesthetic apparatuses let us question the blind spots of our own subjectivity.
• Aesthetic experience acts as a laboratory for reworking values
• Aesthetic experience succeeds or fails on attentional quality, not object traits
• Aesthetic laboratories protect attention by suspending communicational pressures
• All aesthetic venues share a meta-attentional engagement structure
• An attention economy requires reducing diverse attention to one quantifiable substance.
• Apparent multi-tasking is really rapid sequential switching between tasks
• AR experiences produce a felt separation between map and territory, not confusion.
• Attending to a work can itself constitute an artistic act
• Attention acts as negentropy by substituting certitude for trial and error
• Attention also varies in quality and mode, not just quantity
• Attention always responds to something else and never rests still.
• Attention and technology co-evolve through reciprocal causation
• Attention as means differs fundamentally from attention as end in itself
• Attention asymmetries stem from production structures, not individual bad will.
• Attention cannot be treated as a value-neutral economic resource because it shapes ends
• Attention cannot function as currency without homogenizing measurement
• Attention consists in labor that augments our ability to notice the neglected
• Attention deficit disorders partly reflect unhealthy attention environments
• Attention disorders confer perceptual advantages that misaligned perspectives obscure in others
• Attention ecology is a surprisingly underinvestigated field needing new vocabulary
• Attention ecology rejects a coercive de-alienation of distracted audiences.
• Attention ecology requires modulating between deep and distributed focus.
• Attention enables individuals to become themselves, not merely survive
• Attention in aesthetic experience historically derives from prayer
• Attention inequality forms a distinct axis of class alongside money
• Attention is a finite resource whose unequal distribution produces symbolic misery
• Attention is a superimposition of entangled mechanisms rather than a single faculty
• Attention is a vector, not a scalar, because it aims beyond itself
• Attention is an interactive relation to one’s life-sustaining environment, not a resource
• Attention is an interface, so free-will versus determinism debates about it are pointless.
• Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production
• Attention is conditioned and constitutive of collective flows simultaneously, without contradiction
• Attention is directional potential, not a static countable quantity.
• Attention is fundamentally a collecting and filtering act for survival.
• Attention is fundamentally a growth of our faculty for noticing
• Attention is fundamentally alienated because it is always directed at something else.
• Attention is more valuable when it diverges from others than when it aligns
• Attention is not an organ or substance but a dynamic state of cognitive unison
• Attention is not just a filter of perception but the formative interface of identity
• Attention is the most personal possession yet exists only as something to be alienated
• Attention itself constitutes productive labor that generates value
• Attention modulates in discrete samples just as digital media do
• Attention only becomes convertible capital through homogenizing measurement devices
• Attention operates as an ecosystem of echoes and variations rather than transmissions
• Attention research is dominated by methodological individualism
• Attention resists exchange because it is always particular and embodied
• Attention scarcity can be turned into an asset through redistributed attention
• Attention scarcity plagued writers and scholars centuries before digital media
• Attention selects which technical developments get pursued, forming a recursive loop with the brain
• Attention serves communal needs rather than minority growth interests
• Attention slowly forms through care and constitutes the social bond
• Attention splits into immediate capture and slower captivating motor-emotional schemas
• Attention systems divide between subjective rating and algorithmic ranking.
• Attention theories have long split attention into automatic and intentional spheres
• Attention theory shifted from passive submission to active investment around 1750
• Attention transforms raw information into images rather than choosing among made ones
• Attention works as a needle weaving global links at the price of inequality
• Attention-crisis discourse has become nostalgic, not futuristic
• Attention-economy analysis must be reframed within a broader attention ecosophy
• Attention’s deepest ground is the material medium of perception itself
• Attention’s present-bound nature contradicts the notion of capital accumulation
• Attention’s task is learning to perceive its own background
• Attentional alignment with others generates communal powers no individual could reach alone
• Attentional experiences rest on an exploited global material labor chain
• Attentional habits divide the world into meaningful figures and neglected ground
• Attentional tasks fail when capacity cannot meet their demands
• Attentive extraction and object excess are the same act
• Automatic attention is sedimented past attention and belongs in any attention ecology
• Automatic cliché-based attention switches to critical attention whenever expectations fail
• Being attacked beats being ignored in the attention economy
• Bodily proximity forces a sincerity that media stardom structurally cannot achieve.
• Both creating and receiving art demand skilled labor on attention
• Broadcast and network systems differ structurally in direction of information flow
• Business models now give goods away free in exchange for user attention.
• Capitalism had to teach people to stop paying attention to pollution.
• Capitalism operates as opportunistic parasitism, not optimal allocation
• Carr’s real question is protecting depth, not internet-induced stupidity.
• Celebrity functions as stored attention convertible into commercial influence
• Chamber music prefigures the structure of telematic society
• Cheaper machine attention is displacing human judgment in evaluation.
• Children’s inattention often reflects unlistenable teaching, not distraction
• Classic celebrity discourse centers on the gap between image and the real person
• Classrooms form two opposing attention structures modeled on radio broadcast versus network dialogue
• Climate inattention is a collective failure to dedicate attentional resources
• Collective intelligence depends on material infrastructure beyond human minds
• Collective intelligence exceeds any individual’s without erasing individual expertise
• Collective political attention is structured by environmental agenda-setting mechanisms.
• Complaints about youthful inattention may partly reflect declining authority
• Constant mediatized interruption corrodes attention to others and to self
• Content transmission no longer defines schooling once information is instantly accessible
• Continuous partial attention becomes a survival tool when teammates compensate for blind spots
• Curiosity must be protected from both industrial discipline and financial extraction
• Current attention-organizing logics serve financial interests and are self-destructive.
• Deep ecology understands beings as constituted by their relations, not as separate from environments
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity.
• Digital images subject attention to objective abstractions preconfigured by protocols
• Digital natives are the best-adjusted teens on record by statistical measures.
• Digital technologies replace human attentional energy with electrical energy.
• Digitalization reduces the sensory continuum to standardized discrete units manipulable by logic
• Diluted aesthetic experiences in mass media spread value reprocessing to broad audiences
• Discourse on the attention economy took off sharply around 1996
• Discretion and concealment constitute meaningful resistance to attention capitalism
• Distraction and mediation can be emancipatory rather than merely degrading
• Distraction enables perception that focused attention forecloses
• Early attention economy thinkers prioritized experiential quality over productive quantification
• Economic accounts of attention falsely derive the collective from individual activity
• Economic metaphors about attention conceal more than they reveal by hiding key differences
• Education automates perception-reaction links, blurring the line between passivity and activity
• Embodied framing creates meaning and thereby information
• Emotion overturns individuated structures only through communal resonance.
• Emotions function as thermometers of the attentional ecosystem between persons
• Enunciative power asymmetry still obligates speakers to give attention to get attention
• Environmental attention includes preventative maintenance against exhaustion of resources.
• Environmental politics needs a third path between local experiments and macro-association
• Evaluation procedures produce the value they claim to measure.
• Experiments reify attention while it is actually a plastic flux
• Fame now precedes wealth in the attention economy
• Focused attention necessarily amputates awareness of other stimuli
• Free digital services are paid for by users’ attention.
• Free-floating attention suspends reasoning constraints to enable resonant re-association
• Genuine attention is astonishment rather than anticipation
• Georg Franck built the best attention-economy framework yet remains unknown outside Germany.
• Giving others the benefit of the doubt extends vigilance against one’s own blind spots
• Herbert Simon defined attention as the scarce resource that information consumes.
• Herd attention results from profit logic, not algorithms themselves
• Herding is constitutive of sociality and need not be moralized away.
• Human serial attention limits make attention the scarce resource
• Hyper reading alters brain structure in ways pedagogy ignores.
• Image and text circulation materially drives the climate crisis through its physical substrates
• Images gain meaning only through each receiver’s embodied reprocessing operations
• Inattentive engagement with a task is a learned sophisticated capacity
• Individual attention selection spontaneously aligns people into shared communities of sensibility
• Individual choice does not precede but follows collective media enthralments.
• Individual identity is constituted by what one attends to
• Individual identity is strengthened by representation in others’ attention
• Individualized ADHD treatment substitutes medication for systemic reform
• Industrial capitalism both produces inattention and pathologizes it
• Information abundance paradoxically makes signal transmission more expensive
• Information overload reflects an excess of healthy curiosity
• Intergenerational carelessness reveals economics’ blindness to reproducing the communal life-support
• Interlaced but decoupled attentions generate knowledge exceeding any member’s contribution
• Interpretative skill cannot be digitized because it is embodied know-how
• Isolation behind screens, not video games, drives school shootings
• Joint attention depends on bidirectional attention circulation, not equality
• Joint attention emerges in infants around nine months through triadic gaze-following
• Joint attention originated as a survival reflex against predators.
• Joint attention requires co-presence, excluding algorithm-mediated influences
• Joint attentional protocols can be performed publicly to draw attention to neglected objects
• Lab attention findings only confirm old principles of pertinence
• Laboratory attention studies are structurally blind to relational value
• Lack of collective attention lets polluting production dominate desirable lifestyles
• Literary studies must be reinvented, not merely recovered, as an attentional practice.
• Looking at an object constitutes labor that increases its value
• Mainstream television has become more intellectually demanding over recent decades
• Maintaining social connection precedes exchanging accurate information in dialogue
• Market efficiency fails once attention becomes scarce, requiring corrective intervention
• Mass distraction is not uniformly harmful but has differential collective effects
• Mass media exploit receiver attention through a stark production-to-reception asymmetry.
• Mass media exploit receivers because industrial production meets artisanal biological reception.
• Mass media function as banks for the attention economy
• Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange
• Media ecology is simultaneously superstructural and infrastructural
• Media function as resonance vaults synchronizing affects, not channels for information.
• Media influence works through formal rather than efficient causation
• Media loyalty regimes achieve trust by inducing hypnotic indifference
• Media manipulation is not a them-versus-us relation but a shared echosystem
• Media-anxiety critiques are wrong about apocalypse but right about real dangers.
• Mediatized market societies increasingly waste resources producing demand rather than goods
• Metaleptic collapse of narrative levels defines reflexive attention’s target
• Minimal survival attention is deficient in three ways that expose the neoliberal rationality gap
• Neoliberalism conflates bare survival with the good life by ignoring the means-ends entanglement
• Networked organizing erases the spatial and temporal boundaries consciousness-raising depended on
• Nostalgic championing of deep reading risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of its decline
• Only enjoyable or exciting content can genuinely command attention.
• Organizations rarely sustain attention that is simultaneously vigilant and pluralist
• Overabundance of supply invalidates classical scarcity-based economic reasoning
• Paid ad links colonize the priority visibility once reserved for pertinent content
• People can pay attention to something while being unaware they are attending to it
• Performing at one-to-one scale deliberately neutralizes celebrity aura and asymmetry
• Permanent alertness exhausts itself by killing sustained attention
• Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers
• Political unity is strengthened rather than weakened by divergent attentions
• Politically resisting attention capitalism requires sabotaging ratings systems
• Pre-print cultural exposure was limited to sermons, frescos, and travelling spectacles
• Presential attention defines human environments as ecosystems of communion
• Presential joint attention differs in kind from media-captured attention by its participant-limited scale.
• Programming perception through technical devices leads to programming behavior
• Radical attention is rooted in proximate 1-to-1 scale practices
• Radicals and managers jointly expand collective attention through their conflict.
• Reflexive attention takes another person’s attention as its own object.
• Reflexive meta-attention on one’s own habits is what makes attention genuinely individuating.
• Rhetoric and style have served as attention-capture disciplines for millennia
• Rich aesthetic attention requires tolerating delayed understanding
• Rooted attention should be trusted more than managerial attention in conflicts
• Scalar quantification, not movement, is what makes vectoralist power exploitative
• Scaled-down abstract plans structure managerial attention from above
• Scarcity has shifted from production of goods to consumption of attention.
• Search engines as attention condensers make data seem to speak for themselves
• Security regimes prioritize survival at the cost of becoming ourselves
• Self-critique drives deeper immersion into the interpreted object
• Shared physical co-presence enables the cognitive harmonizations that build subjectivity
• Small remote gatherings can beat huge in-person lectures as attention ecosystems
• So-called attention deficit is misdirected attention, not absence of attention
• Social echo dynamics always rest on physico-chemical ecological constraints
• Standard ADHD diagnosis individualizes what is actually a systemic condition
• Subjectivity requires physical proximity to other attentive bodies that media cannot replace.
• Surveillance platforms depend on the very agency they exploit.
• Sustained collective looking restabilizes meaning amid endless digital reframing
• Sync and body-presence are required for affective resonance in teaching
• Synchronized collective watching sustains the production system
• Tarde described fame as an economy of visibility measured by attentional convergence.
• Tarde saw advertising as structured by interruption and fixation of attention.
• Teaching is continual reinterpretation rather than transmission of fixed content
• Text-only communication escalates conflict because it lacks real-time facial feedback
• The alertness regime dominates the mediasphere because it captures advertiser attention fastest.
• The attention economy predates digital technology by 150 years
• The capitulation-versus-rigor teaching debate can be reframed by attention ecology
• The collective attentional ecosystem, not the teacher, is the classroom’s agent.
• The economic paradigm distorts our understanding of how attention actually functions
• The fragmentation of activist collectives aided capitalism’s current dominance
• The occupiers rhetorically capture the architects’ language for themselves
• The professor’s authority, not student essentialism, may set classroom dynamics
• The transindividual is a system of resonance exceeding any individual.
• The word attention derives from a warning against danger.
• Theft and criticism become gifts when living off visibility
• Thought originates in vectoral attention before hardening into scalar form.
• Today’s attention choices shape the devices that will condition tomorrow’s attention
• TV channels operate as banks loaning out attention capital
• Two rival attention regimes define managerial and radical ecology
• Unconscious automatic attention makes brand messages imprint without our awareness
• Unequaled variety of access comes with homogenizing standardization imposed by protocols
• Universal access to cultural works at zero marginal cost defines the new horizon
• Unnoticed items in the sensory field still shape thinking and action
• Value under digital capitalism rests on appearing, not possessing.
• Viewing is itself an active, transformative act rather than its opposite
• Visibility functions as income allowing employers to underpay in cash
• Watching irreversible real-time gestures is a rare and uniquely attention-grabbing experience
• What seems like personal perception is routed through collective circulating images and discourses.
• Withholding explanatory material makes an artwork demand active audience participation.
• Withholding focused attention can reveal what a speaker actually means
• World cultures are repositories of interpretative practices, not mere knowledge
• Younger generations already perceive reality as always mediatized by simulacra.