Issue #24 July 2019

What is the Price of our Attention?

What does it mean to pay attention?

In common language, we mostly talk about attention when we really want to talk about focusing on something. For example, students are often asked to “pay attention” to class. While we usually think about attention as something natural and under the control of our mind, we do actually experience it quite differently. In this daily experience we are confronted to two kinds of attention: passive and active attention. While focusing is a thing, attention isn’t just that: our attention is also drawn by elements of our environment without our will. When I wanted to focus entirely on this essay, a leaf flew by my window, carried by the wind, and made me look elsewhere and think about something else. For Henri Bergson, attention allows us to define “useful objects”4placeholder in our environment. In each context we live in, there is an near infinite number of objects that could draw our attention. By defining one object as more important than the others, we ignore the biggest part of our environment in order to be able to move on. Hyperactivity, or attention deficit, could then be seen as a difficulty to define what is important and what isn’t: subjects pay attention to too many objects at the same time and not enough attention to what we want them to. We don’t naturally know what we should pay attention to, prioritizing objects of attention is something that we learn. A young child is confronted to otherness and this confrontation teaches him how to act and what he should pay attention to. An example of this development of attention can be seen in L’enfant sauvage by François Truffaut5placeholder.

L’enfant sauvage by François Truffaut, the doctor is trying to get Victor’s attention (1)
L’enfant sauvage by François Truffaut, the doctor is trying to get Victor’s attention (2)

Capitalism and the economy of attention

What is worth our attention?

The economy of attention occupies and deviates our attention towards objects that are shaped and organized to temporarily fulfill our needs and desires in order to generate money. If what we pay attention to is pre-determined by our digital identity, it makes us less active in our research of what we should pay attention to. What is worth of our attention? This is, of course, a complex question that cannot have an objective and definitive answer, since it has to be a personal one. Each one of us must define what they really care about and what they really want to pay attention to. In a short essay called The importance of what we care about 19placeholder, Harry Frankfurt shows how what we care about is essential to our development 20placeholder; for him, it is an important part of what makes us unique. Hartmut Rosa uses this idea and shows how the acceleration and the occupation of our time and attention by the economy of attention makes it harder to take the time to search for and find what we care about, and thus, to have a fulfilling life. He writes: “We can’t function as humans if we don’t have an idea of where to go and of what constitutes a good, meaningful life”.21placeholder Without lecturing about what we should pay attention to and about the danger of digital media on our attention, it seems important to at least think about the best conditions to fulfill oneself. One of these conditions seems to be found in times of isolation from the media; Yves Citton describes those as “attentional vacuoles”22placeholder. In order to define a meaningful life, we need to question it ourselves, we need to pay attention to what we care about and to what we really want to pay attention to. By fleeing boredom23placeholder and isolated times with constant distractions, we put ourselves in a position where we don’t really have control over our lives. “Attentional vacuoles” seem particularly important for children, since they are learning how to pay attention, and developing their uniqueness.

Another issue worth of our attention is the way our media consumption invisibly impacts our environment. Most of the time, when digital media is mentioned, a lexical field of immateriality is used: cloud, virtual, wireless… The internet seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A simple phone allows us to connect to a whole world of entertainment so easy to access and so ubiquitous that we naturally tend to forget that this world isn’t disconnected from our physical environment. The economy of attention is actually very material: hundreds of thousands of kilometers of cable spread around the world connect every user, thousands of servers made of thousands of computers hold our files online, billions of computers and smartphones are used and replaced every two or three years and allow us to access the internet. In 2012, Sy Taffel wrote an article about the material cost of the economy of attention24placeholder: this article shows how we can make direct connections between our media consumption and child labor, ecological disasters provoked by unreasonable mining or underpaid workers. Another way the economy of attention impacts our environment is by its economic logic based on advertising and consumption, made continuously accessible. While we shall not blame the economy of attention for every known woes of our world, we should certainly keep an eye on the reasons behind our increasing media consumption and on the ecological costs it has.

Quentin Le Garrec is a french multimedia art director and graphic designer born in 1995. After a first year of a Bachelor degree in Philosophy, he re-oriented himself in Graphic Design studies. During his Higher national diploma (master) in multimedia graphic design he worked on the subject of ‘attention’. You can see his work at quentinlegarrec.com

Works Cited

Hannah Arendt, Condition de l’homme moderne, Presse pocket, Paris, 1988.

Henri Bergson, Le rire, Petite biblio Payot, Barcelone, 1900.

Dominique Boullier, Médiologie des régimes d’attention, dans Yves Citton, l’économie de l’attention, La Découverte, Paris.

Sébastien Broca, « Hartmut Rosa, Aliénation et accélération. Vers une théorie critique de la modernité tardive », Lectures [En ligne], Les comptes rendus, 2012, mis en ligne le 21 mai 2012, consulté le 26 décembre 2018. http://journals.openedition.org/lectures/8447

Yves Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention, Seuil, Nanterre, 2014.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7. Le capitalisme à l’assaut du sommeil, La Découverte, Paris, 2014, Traduit de l’anglais (Etats-Unis) par Grégoire Chamayou.

Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to build habit-forming products, Portfolio Penguin, 2014.

Harry Frankfurt, The importance of what we care about. Philosophical essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988.

Annick Lantenois, Le vertige du funambule, B42, Mayenne, 2013, cover.

Matteo Pasquinelli, Google PageRank : une machine de valorisation et d’exploitation de l’attention dans Yves Citton, L’économie de l’attention, La Découverte, Paris, traduit par Clément Blachier, Victor Lockwood & Xiaomeng Zuo, 2014, p.167–174.

Pascal, Pensées, Divertissement 132–139, 1670

Hartmut Rosa, Aliénation et accélération Vers une théorie critique de la modernité tardive, La Découverte/Poche, Saint-Amand-Montrond (Cher), 2010, traduit de l’anglais par Thomas Chaumont

Bernard Stiegler, Le numérique empêche-t-il de penser? Esprit presse, Janvier 2014 https://esprit.presse.fr/article/stiegler-bernard/le-numerique-empeche-t-il-de-penser-bernard-stiegler-37683

Sy Taffel, Escaping attention: digital media hardware, materiality and ecological cost, dans Culture Machine Volume 13 Paying Attention, digital edition, 2012, p.3–14.

François Truffaut, L’enfant Sauvage, 1970.

11

“Relationism” is the idea that we should not separate mediatic, environmental, psychological and social issues, since they are all actually in relation and impact one another. The media are particularly related to every discipline, since they drive our collective attention to chosen topics. This is an idea developed by Félix Guattari, reused by Yves Citton and that can also be seen in Jacque Derrida’s works.

22

Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a young tradesman, 1748

33

This idea is developed by several thinkers I will refer to: Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Crary, Martin Heidegger and I think it can also be seen through the works of several artists: Vincent Van Gogh, David Lynch, John Fante… Creations without an actual target or objective are often more surprising, interesting, unique, and in the end, they tend to touch people more deeply and lastingly than contents meant to target a wider audience.

44

Henri Bergson, Le rire, Petite biblio Payot, Barcelone, 1900, p.148

55

François Truffaut, L’enfant Sauvage, 1970

66

Yves Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention, Seuil, Nanterre, 2014, p.51

77

Dominique Boullier, Médiologie des régimes d’attention, dans Yves Citton, l’économie de l’attention, La Découverte, Paris, p.93

88

Hartmut Rosa, Aliénation et accélération. Vers une théorie critique de la modernité tardive

99

Sébastien Broca, « Hartmut Rosa, Aliénation et accélération. Vers une théorie critique de la modernité tardive », Lectures [En ligne], Les comptes rendus, 2012, mis en ligne le 21 mai 2012, consulté le 26 décembre 2018. http://journals.openedition.org/lectures/8447

1010

Bernard Stiegler, Le numérique empêche-t-il de penser? Esprit presse, Janvier 2014 https://esprit.presse.fr/article/stiegler-bernard/le-numerique-empeche-t-il-de-penser-bernard-stiegler-37683

1111

Hartmut Rosa, op.cit. p.185

1212

Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a young tradesman, 1748

1313

Jonathan Crary, 24/7. Le capitalisme à l’assaut du sommeil, La Découverte, Paris, 2014, Traduit de l’anglais (Etats-Unis) par Grégoire Chamayou, 144 pages.

1414

Hannah Arendt, Condition de l’homme moderne, Presse pocket, Paris, 1988, p.185

1515

Matteo Pasquinelli, Google PageRank : une machine de valorisation et d’exploitation de l’attention dans Yves Citton, L’économie de l’attention, La Découverte, Paris, traduit par Clément Blachier, Victor Lockwood & Xiaomeng Zuo, 2014, p.167–174

1616

Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to build habit-forming products, Portfolio Penguin, 2014, 256 pages

1717

Hartmut Rosa, Aliénation et accélération Vers une théorie critique de la modernité tardive, La Découverte/Poche, Saint-Amand-Montrond (Cher), 2010, traduit de l’anglais par Thomas Chaumont

1818

Ibid. p.82

1919

Harry Frankfurt, The importance of what we care about. Philosophical essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988

2020

Ibid.

2121

Hartmut Rosa, op. cit, p.69

2222

Yves Citton, Pour une écologie de l’attention, op. cit, p.259

2323

Pascal, Pensées, Divertissement 132–139, 1670

2424

Sy Taffel, Escaping attention: digital media hardware, materiality and ecological cost, dans Culture Machine Volume 13 Paying Attention, digital edition, 2012, p.3–14

2525

Annick Lantenois, Le vertige du funambule, B42, Mayenne, 2013, cover

#24

July 2019

Introduction

Stoics Are Already Standing Up

by Kai Whiting

What is the Price of our Attention?

by Quentin Le Garrec

Kant and the Contraption: A Thought Experiment

by John C. Brady