Spotlight, starlight and daylight are all "lights of attention". Stir To Action asks: how do we defend them, in the social media age?

From Stir To Action

In the week when Elon Musk made his sprawling bid to own one of the most attention-grabbing media platforms, Twitter, we were happy to receive news that the next edition of the radical economic magazine Stir To Action (often profiled here) was focussing on “attention”, its economics and politics.

It includes a powerful extract from the French philosopher of attention Yves Citton, and a review of Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus - Why You Can’t Pay Attention. Stir To Action is always very much worth the purchase - you can buy or subscribe here, and choose a number of physical and digital options.

But we were thrilled to see that the magazine has a major essay from the educator Inez Aponte (who has written in these pages). The piece brilliantly synthesises major thinkers on the attention economy. We’ve taken just a few extracts from the piece, to urge you purchase the edition with the full essay:

INEZ APONTE:

…James Williams. In his 2018 book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy he argues that we are, both individually and collectively, facing a crisis of self-regulation.

Surrounded by “ubiquitous industrialised, intelligent and in many cases, adversarial types of persuasion” we are redirected from our own goals towards corporate goals of profit generation. “I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that the digital attention economy is the largest and most effective system for human attitudinal and behavioural manipulation the world has ever seen.”

He distinguishes three ‘lights of attention’ that are undermined by the attention economy’s distraction machines: spotlight, starlight, and daylight.

The spotlight of attention enables us to focus on our immediate goals: writing an email, tidying up the house, taking care of a friend. When we get interrupted by online notifications or distracted by an advert, we fracture this form of attention. A study conducted at the University of California, Irving indicated that it takes, on average, 23 minutes to refocus. Due to the frequency of distractions, some of us in fact never reach a deep form of attention.

Starlight shines on our medium-term goals, such as learning an instrument, improving our health, or completing a project. With average social media use at over two hours a day, one can only imagine the range of thwarted achievements.

Finally, daylight supports us to “want what we want to want”. This is the light of our values and long-term goals. Williams warns that undermining our daylight may be the most serious and unnoticed danger of the attention economy.

“When our daylight is compromised, epistemic distraction results. Epistemic distraction is the diminishment of underlying capacities that allow a person to define or pursue their goals: capacities essential for democracy such as reflection, memory, prediction, leisure, reasoning and goal setting.”

Williams and many others, such as Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus – Why You Can’t Pay Attention, believe we are now seeing a vicious cycle of distraction leading to a loss of an ‘internal locus of control’. An internal locus of control gives us the sense that we can influence the world around us. But as our ability to pay attention degrades, we are less able to achieve our goals and feel less able to influence the world; this increases our anxiety levels, which in turn degrades our attention.

…In the face of such a colossal attention (and power) grab, what can we do to reclaim what is rightfully ours? Professor Yves Citton, in his book The Ecology of Attention (2016), argues that we have paid too much attention to what is in the foreground – facts, figures, what our eyes can see – and proposes that we shift our attention to those elements of life which we hitherto placed in the background: most importantly, our own environment.

It is an illusion to think that the attention economy can exist without the material conditions of a thriving Earth. There has never been a more pressing time to give our full and undivided attention to what is happening to our life support system. Williams too believes we must give attention to the things that matter and that requires defending our “attentional freedom”.

The internet has rapidly become a new social arena, but we have failed to implement adequate systems to enable ethical behaviour and prohibit the rampant attention hijacking we have seen. Our 'attention ecology' needs an ethics infrastructure – what Italian philosopher Luciano Floridi terms infraethics – to ensure we protect our capacity to shine our light of attention where we choose.

Tech critic Shoshana Zuboff proposes that in this time of epistemic chaos we must “create order together”, in the form of laws, rights, and policies. Instead of arguing downstream about the details of the data property contract, we need to go upstream and declare that the property contract is illegitimate and start outlawing the massive scale extraction of human experience.

According to Simone Weil. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”

We can collectively reclaim the daylight of our attention, our right to decide what matters and what we wish to tend to. We do this every time we offer someone our full undivided attention, every time that we decide to consciously tend to a person or thing that really matters. This “rarest and purest form of generosity” is our birth right and it is our duty to future generations to salvage and protect it.

Stir To Action is available here.