Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line) — The Political Economy of Attention
24 published claims from this book.
- Abundant information makes human attention a scarce economic resource.
- Anthropologists themselves operate within political economies of attention.
- Anthropology has studied attention mostly implicitly, not as an explicit topic
- Attention and care mirror each other as shadow and light
- Attention became the dominant frame for explaining Trump-era politics.
- Attention can be anthropologically theorized as either technologies or techniques
- Attention functions as a political economy embedded in specific temporal contexts
- Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle
- Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally.
- Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one.
- Attention is an activity that forms persons, not a resource that platforms act upon
- Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource
- Attention now functions like money as a common metric for cultural value.
- Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given
- Attention’s slipperiness itself makes it a subject for ethnographic study.
- Attentional scaffolds controllable by individuals constitute techniques of attention.
- Five Heideggerian categories of attentional pull explain how things claim our attention.
- Gamblers pursue a loss-of-self attentional state that machine design deliberately engineers
- Pious Muslim self-cultivation functions as a rigorous attentional discipline.
- Spiritual experience is learned through attending to the mind in specific trained ways
- The line between forced and free attention is itself a political question needing investigation
- Today’s digital attention anxieties were anticipated by late-twentieth-century ADHD medicalization debates
- Whether one merits online attention is socially contested among Muslim women in Denmark.
- Workplace access restrictions function as organizational control over worker attention.