Abstract
The idea that attention is today to be viewed as a resource with enormous economic value is rooted in common sense. Indeed, this theme—along with the related social concern about the degradation of this resource, to the point of producing an “attention crisis”—has been reiterated in several bestsellers for more than two decades now, although an additional and significant point was recently added: “your attention didn't collapse. It was stolen” (Hari 2022). Others even argue that we are witnessing a structural mutation of capitalism, fueled by the so’called “attention economy.”
For those who are worried about the impact of this crisis, these changes would have the capacity to destroy at a single stroke our intelligence and, consequently, the democratic public sphere as we have known it so far. Clearly, this has come about due to the widespread diffusion of digital technologies and the related generalized social concern for the effects of such technologies on the neuronal configuration of our mental processes. To address these issues, a substantial part of the literature has relied almost exclusively on the results offered by cognitive psychology and, more recently, neurosciences. Yet there is another path for interrogating these same phenomena—one where sociology is more helpful. While authoritative commentators have lamented that there is still a lack of systematic interest in attention as a research subject in this area of expertise (Schroer 2019; Zerubavel 2015), several sociologists have nonetheless contributed to a rich debate within a constitutive interdisciplinary field of study—“critical attention studies,” to borrow Kenneth Rogers’s (2014) expression—that has gradually emerged over the last two decades. Historians, art theorists, developmental psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, literary and media theorists, and communication scientists have begun to study attention not only in terms of a biologically determined process.
The books reviewed here contribute to this debate, in which the research interest is not limited to the effects of new technologies on the development of the mind, but rather extends to the complex social processes that preside over the added value, exchange, storage, and exploitation of attention. These volumes contribute to the debate in at least two directions. On the one hand, as we shall see in the first part of the review, they address and actualize one of the constituent nodes of this body of interdisciplinary scholarship, namely the critique of the hegemonic discourse that, variously declined, goes by the name of “attention economy.” On the other hand, in the second part of the review we consider the need to go beyond the limits of economistic and technodeterminist perspectives that leads many authors to explore alternatives, and thus to ask in what terms it is possible to think about a politics of attention.
The book Communication in the Era of Attention Scarcity, edited by Waddick Doyle and Claudia Roda, is perfectly representative of the critical attention studies debate, not only because it addresses all the above’mentioned issues, but also because it presents contributions from some historical figures in this field of study, such as the sociologist Dominique Boullier, the media theorist Yves Citton, and the versatile sociologist and architect Georg Franck, as well as Roda herself, a professor of Computer Science who has long been concerned with Human-Computer Interaction in relation specifically to attention. At the same time, the book is also an excellent starting point for readers who are approaching these topics for the first time; and to this end, the chapter “A Roadmap of Studies in Attention and Digital Technology,” authored by Roda, is certainly valuable. Overall, the book's approach significantly differs from the most popular techno’deterministic perspectives. Indeed, the “attention problem” is not interpreted as being automatically and exclusively caused by the spread of digital technologies; rather, they are part of the wider social context, and, at the same time, they express it. Therefore, technologies are designed by interests and assumptions that may even be contradictory to each other—as Global Communications professor Robert Payne's contribution on “Productivity app” exemplarily shows.
At the same time, as widely recognized in critical attention studies, neither the “attention problem” nor the attention economy are linked exclusively to digital technologies, and so their novelty should be considerably downplayed. Indeed, Franck was one of the first—if not the first—to speak about the economy of attention in the 1990s, long before the spread of digital media. He had actually discussed “Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit” (1993, English translation 2019) to refer to a business model and a new form of capitalism where mass media are its key players, since they perform functions similar to those that banks have in the financial system: that is, they invest, lend, and own attention capital. In his latest book, Vanity Fairs: Another View of the Economy of Attention, Franck discusses his theory also in relation to digital technology. From his point of view, digital technology does not change the logic behind the attention economy but enhances the ability to uniformly quantify attention. Indeed, the key point concerns the desirability of others’ attention, which for Franck is “the most irresistible of drugs” (p. 1). The author goes so far as to consider this trait as a constitutive element of human beings as a social species—we are “natural-born attention addicts” (p. 24).
The Vanity Fair is thus the social organization of this constant and constitutive search for and exchange of attention. Therefore, the attention economy, as it is normally understood, is a minor case of the broader category of the vanity fair. This extension, however, passes through a reinterpretation of the concept of attention itself: whereas the attention economy sees in it only a mechanism for selecting information, Franck foregrounds its qualitative and immediately social dimension. Only in this way is it possible to understand why we are addicted to attention: to have someone's attention is to play a role in that person's consciousness.
With explicit reference to pragmatic linguistics and George Herbert Mead, Franck attempts to explore the implications that follow from considering attention’seeking as confirmation of our presence in the consciousness of others. The term “vanity” refers precisely to this human predisposition, which Franck compares to a real instinct. On the other hand, this does not mean, according to the German sociologist, that at the overall social level attention is not valued and “weighed” or that all exchanges of attention are equivalent to each other. The book is precisely an attempt to understand how this estimation takes place, despite the fact that it is not possible to directly access others’ consciousness.
What the author calls the “self-esteem economy” is based “on a dualism of jurisdiction: on unmediated self’respect on the one hand and mediated self’esteem on the other” (p. 26). In the former, the ego evaluates itself only by its own standards, while in the latter, the attention of others, always affectively colored, is more important. Since, however, we are also capable of giving attention—that is, we are producers of attention, to use the (by no means neutral) metaphor of the market, to which Franck always refers—then a circuit, sometimes symmetrical, of “affective self-awareness” is created. Franck also discusses a number of tricks, strategies, and distortions that intervene in this process and that make it much more creative and flexible than it might seem at first glance. We cannot account here for these strategies, but we are interested in pointing out that Franck nevertheless follows the market model—even if a very particular one. In fact, the author analyzes in detail those types of markets that seem to regulate themselves in an original way, such as precisely “markets for ideas” and, in particular, art and academic markets. Both of them in fact suffer “from a disparity between high claims of quality and shaky means of measuring the quality” (p. 35). The media, according to Franck, have adopted as their working model precisely the market for scientific information, where information is offered in exchange for attention and in order to accrue attention incomes.
Considering the attention economy as a special case of the broader vanity fair tends to extend the scope of attention “transactions” to other social spheres. In a different approach, the sociologist Emmanuel Kessous, in “Méritocratie de l’attention,” from Nathalie Grandjean and Alain Loute's edited volume Valeurs de l’attention: Perspectives éthiques, politiques et épistémologiques, proposes to analyze the ideological character of approaches that refer to the attention economy and thus read them as a normative system of behaviors usually expected of digital users. His investigation is based on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s (2006) framework of the economies of worth and thus has a “grammatical” objective: it aims to identify the rules that specify appropriate behaviors in a given situation through the study of business handbooks in the attention economy. For Kessous, the attention economy is thus an expression of the new spirit of capitalism, with its specific “principles of judgment and hierarchy of beings,” but also with its “forms of justice.” Within the normative framework of the attention economy, the “worth of the worthy” consists in the ability to govern one's attention conveniently and efficiently with respect to the purposes of the company. Only then can the leaders also govern the attention of others, that is, their followers (conversely, the unworthy are unable to govern their own attention and therefore do not deserve the attention of others).
What thus emerges clearly in Kessous's chapter is that the logic of the attention economy is based on specific assumptions—the idea of attention as a common good or a resource, competition in a context in which we are all producers and consumers of attention, and so forth—that respond to certain interests and have their own historical origin. Therefore, there are also alternative logics that respond to political choices. Dominique Boullier's contribution, “Designing Envelopes for Attention Policies,” to Doyle and Roda's volume is certainly one of the most original ways of exploring them. The French sociologist insists, like Franck, on the importance of reading the issue of attention in light of the financialization of the capitalist system. Unlike Franck, however, Boullier proposes a multidimensional heuristic tool that serves to account for the existence of the specific logics that structure differentiated attentional environments (rather than reading them through a single regulating principle—the vanity fair, for example—however multifaceted and complex).
Based on the work of Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Peter Sloterdijk, Boullier arrives at the formulation of a “compass of attentional regimes,” structured in four quadrants divided by two axes—on the ordinate the uncertainty’certainty axis and on the abscissa the detachment’attachment axis. The four policies of attention that result from their intersection are alertness, immersion, projection, and fidelity, and each of them is linked to a specific attentional posture. Loyalty, for example, corresponds to the regime in which both certainty and attachment are high (thus implying a strong and enduring attentional bond) and is the typical regime of traditional belief systems, but also of some business strategies. Alertness, on the opposite end of the spectrum, has a high level of uncertainty and detachment and thus allows for rapid switching between stimuli. The point is that, according to Boullier, “designing envelopes that provoke loyalty differs from emphasizing alertness and stress, as much as offering more or less opportunities of projection than of immersion. . . . However, it is quite clear that these policies of attention have been confiscated by brands in the last 30 years” (p. 72).
These politics can then be negotiated, as discussed in Yves Citton's contribution to Doyle and Roda's book, “Attentional Agency Is Environmental Agency.” Its great merit is that it discusses autonomy and the control of attention in strictly environmental terms (rather than as a problem of unwillingness or in relation to the “infinite power” of technology). The assumption is that both selection mechanisms and “the quality and intensity of our attention are at least partly conditioned by circumstantial factors” (p. 22). Yet, according to Citton, there are specific moments when we can intervene in both the quality and type of attention brought into play: at these moments, we can speak of attentional agency.
At the analytical level, Citton distinguishes four planes on which such agency is situated, to which different scales of attention correspond, and thus different types of intervention: collective (where we can intervene by regulating, for example, information production and data collection by firms); intersubjective (through norms of interaction that support symmetrical and caring relationships); individual (when, for example, we intervene to directly modify the environment in which we are immersed), and computational. By the latter, the author refers to the need to keep in mind that a significant part of our attentional mechanisms is delegated to machines (think, for instance, of the algorithmic selection of news and information relevant for us). At this level attentional agency consists in the “power to hack, that is, the power to break into the black box and fix it, adapt it, customize it, control it, re’appropriate it, subvert it” (p. 28).
Attentional agency thus crosses several domains, including that of representative politics in the narrow sense. This specific aspect is discussed more directly in communication scientist Jayson Harsin's long chapter in Doyle and Roda's volume, “Political Attention: A Genealogy of Reinscriptions.” However, the contribution, which is very interesting in terms of its goals and method, is not entirely convincing with respect to its results. The aim is to offer a genealogical reconstruction of “political attention” through the use of an interdisciplinary approach. However, the entire reconstruction is based on a definition of political attention that is either too narrow or too broad, depending on what is meant by “political.” Indeed, political attention is distinguished from attention in general only on the basis of its object: it is the attention we pay to “politics,” that is, “whenever attention is occupied with or distracted from objects and activities in the process of managing human group conflict and grievances or managing social power, it would involve [Political Attention]” (p. 79). Moreover, although the use of cognitive psychology is certainly appreciable, it should be discussed as part of the same historical process that is to be reconstructed genealogically, rather than assuming its results simply as a matter of fact. The distinction that runs through the chapter, between one form of will’driven political attention (PA1) and another automatic form (PA2), is problematic and risks reproducing a moralistic view of the latter identified with distraction (as is evident, for example, from his diagnosis of contemporary society: “because of its highly treated and controlled nature, it may make more sense to speak of PA2 today as post-PA” [p. 102]).
The need to rethink the “politics of attention” goes hand in hand with the need to question the common definition of attention, precisely from the very distinction between attention and distraction. This purpose is answered by aesthetics and French literature scholar Alessandra Aloisi's recent volume, The Power of Distraction: Diversion and Reverie from Montaigne to Proust. The book aims precisely to explore distraction as a fundamental process of our psychic life rather than as an anomaly that exposes us to the control of others. The author clearly shows that the negative moral judgment toward distraction, often associated with sin, has ancient origins that go far beyond the spread of digital technologies. According to Aloisi, it was Pascal who made a mundanization of distraction (divertissement) starting from the Augustinian lesson: in this context distraction represents the sin of sins, that is, the turning away from the divine in favor of human things, which Pascal sees as a repetition of original sin in everyday life.
Yet it is possible to reconstruct the stages of a path leading to a different idea of distraction starting, as Aloisi does, from the contrast between Pascal and Montaigne. Indeed, the latter sees in distraction (diversion) a “strategy” or a “game of cunning” of thought that, when faced with a concern, prefers to divert, to think of something else, rather than oppose it head on. Thus the multiplicity of processes and practices we traditionally associate with distraction must be explored in depth: it can lead to unexpected discoveries (as, for example, in serendipity), it can produce an unconscious association of ideas and lead to the solution of a problem that was distressing us and to which we were giving “too much attention” (as in Poincaré’s case, discussed in the book), it helps more simply to relax the mind when attention has been overstretched, or it allows us to see as problematic things that are apparently marginal or taken for granted. Distraction can thus also have a subversive function with respect to sedimented beliefs that establish legitimate objects of attention.
Deepening the power of distraction thus means escaping pathologizing perspectives. An essential aspect emerges at this point, which I have previously only mentioned: the study of attention also has a strong normative character. Therefore, once the proper functioning of attention is established, abnormal and pathological forms of it are identified as correlates. The topic of so’called attention deficits—often associated with distraction—is therefore inescapable. The chapter in Grandjean and Loute's book “La psychiatrie et l'attention ou la machine infernale du TDA/H,” by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Patrick Landman, is very useful in this context for one fundamental reason: most critiques of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder have correctly highlighted the wide variety of associated symptoms and, consequently, the problematic nature of interpreting a given symptom as pathological rather than simply as a child's developmental stage. Landman's work, on the other hand, takes these aspects for granted and focuses rather on the epistemological distortions and methodological limitations of most accredited scientific research that supports the biological and genetic origin of such deficits, thus justifying their pharmacological treatment.
At the same time, a discussion of what we assign to the realm of the pathological, as well as the kind of relationships we establish in such contexts, leads us to think about a different and more complex way of understanding attention and thus also rethinking its politics. In order to critique the attention economy without implicitly reproducing its underlying assumptions, it is necessary to further question its central concepts, starting with the very idea of attention as a resource. This idea directs, almost automatically, one to reason in the terms of investment, of more or less efficient use, as well as to banish distraction and idealize concentration. This way of reasoning risks reproducing an image that is very far from the way we make sense of our daily lives. That is, one could shift the focus from the realm of production to the sphere of social reproduction, and it is in this regard that reflections about attention resonate with theories of care. Perhaps it is along these lines that critical studies of attention yield the most promising results, which could guide future research. It is probably no coincidence that Kessous's contribution mentioned above—one of the best analyses of the economics of attention as an ideological normative framework—ends precisely with a reference to theories of care. Moreover, sociologist Natalie Rigaux's chapter in Grandjean and Loute's book, “L’attention aux personnes démentes,” is devoted to analyzing the intertwining of attention and care. The author takes up here the reflections of Simone Weil, a philosopher who systematically analyzed attention but has often been neglected within critical studies. The impression is that the most overlooked aspect of attention today is probably that related to waiting, as “espace d'accueil vide” (p. 64), a constitutive component of attention as the etymology itself testifies (from the Latin “attendere,”“ad”+“tendere,” literally “to stretch toward,” the same root as the French “attendre,” i.e., “to wait”). This void in economic approaches must be filled, while in care perspectives it must maintain its constitutive openness so that it welcomes the otherness of the other. Perhaps it is precisely by looking at the areas that escape value’adding processes that it will be possible to think of truly alternative politics. 1
