by ELI ZARETSKY
In recent years the concept of attention has garnered considerable – well – attention. It has become, we are told, a commodity within the ‘attention economy’, a limited resource over which advertisers, social media companies, streaming services and the like struggle. Though the idea has become increasingly prominent in the age of the internet and smartphones, our interest can be traced back further. Especially since the 1960s, the hypertrophy of images and screens, taking place against the backdrop of an ever-expanding market, has been eroding, or at least transforming, our collective life – familial and communal relations, the natural and built environment, cultural production and reception. Today we are faced with a further leap in the form of AI. According to a recent article by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, this heralds ‘an age of extinction’.
‘The digital age’, Douthat writes, ‘takes embodied things and offers virtual substitutes, moving entire realms of human interaction and engagement from the physical marketplace to the computer screen’. Once we were absorbed by novels and great dramas; today we have Netflix. Once we had face-to-face conversations; today we text. Once we had liberal arts universities; today we have ‘smart’ classrooms. Perhaps most telling, once sexuality was arguably the closest we came to the sacred in secular life; today we have pornography and dating apps. In every case, we have replaced something more difficult and satisfying with something more titillating, accessible and often stupefying. As with climate change, it sometimes seems we have passed the point of no return. In the search for new and ever more exciting forms of distraction, we may be destroying the bases for meaningful life.
To comprehend a cultural explosion of this magnitude we must look more closely at what attention is. A classic definition was provided by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890):
It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.
James’s definition is brilliant, but it is not adequate to our contemporary predicament, and the study of attention since has been largely quantitative and utilitarian. For an alternative, we might turn to the thought of Walter Benjamin. Unlike James, Benjamin did not theorize attention in general, but developed a historical account which assumed that psychological capacities like attention, as well as the stimuli to attention, change as technology and other forces of production change. He did all of this as part of a theory of capitalism, and with a view of its relevance for the Left.
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