In order to think an economy of attention, one has to proceed to a reduction of attentiveness to a quantitative value, to something that can be exchanged against money. But is attention something that can be calculated and exchanged? If so, who sells it, who buys it, and how does it affect us and the world we live in?

While we all have a basic idea of what we are talking about when we talk about attention, a further examination unveils it as a complex philosophical concept. Semantically, attention means an active direction of the mind upon some object or topic. In itself, this definition contains a lot of layers: is our mind directed willingly or not, does it go in several directions at the same time, is it focused on one point only? Our own experience shows that all these layers of attention coexist and are required: we need to focus in order to learn, we need a divided attention in situations that require quick responses to multiple signals, we maintain relations by being thoughtful towards each other. Attention is at the center of our individual and collective existences, it defines what we look at and care about, and thus, it precedes every collective and individual action we take part in. In this “relationist”[1] perspective, the management of attention becomes a multidisciplinary issue, at the same time political, environmental, social, psychological…

This being said, we need to question the influence of the economy on our personal attention: to what extent are the things we care about selected via some personal (deliberative/self-directed/free) process, rather than merely ‘contracted’ from our cultural and economic milieu? I want to explore the discordance between the interests of the economy and the interests of people: are we paying attention to what we should care about? What is worthy of our attention? Who, or what, defines it?

First, I will analyze what we talk about when we talk about attention, and the diversity of conceptions it can lead to. For that purpose, I will examine how attention is formed, how collective attention allows some unity between the members of a group, and how the uniqueness of our experience (and thus of our attention) determines who we are as individuals.

I will then study the systems that monetize our attention. I will explore the birth and evolution of the idea that our personal time is potential money. Potential money for ourselves and for the companies that exploit our attention, and thus our consumption. “Remember that time is money”[2], Benjamin Franklin once wrote. I will then analyze what logic presides over the algorithmic organization of content, and how it affects our consumption of information and our attention, both as individuals and as a group. I will end this segment by examining the efforts made by digital industries to condition and standardize our attention and consumption by progressively fulfilling all our desires.

Finally, I will try to propose some alternatives to this omnipresent (but hidden) economy of attention, and a re-evaluation of attention. I will also explore the idea that unique thoughts and creations come into existence in moments of boredom and free time, in which our attention should not be exploited or steered by consumption or industry[3].

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”[4] 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 Truffaut[5].

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)

At first, the child totally ignores some signals we would immediately react to, like the noise of an object falling on the ground, or the sound of a door opening. The doctor in charge of him progressively understands that the child only responds to signals that announce food in his environment. He then teaches him how to pay attention to things that matters in our society. This shows that children need to experience the attention of others to understand that they should pay attention to their peers. They also need to understand what draws the attention of others to define what should matter. The attention we pay to things that draw the attention of others is called joint attention, and is essential to learn how to focus and how to socially behave. As Bernard Stiegler explains, a child who is mostly ignored all the time won’t understand that he should pay attention to otherness, and will be more likely to have what we diagnose as attention deficit. Since attention is learned and depends on the environment we live in, the fact that it is considered as a tradeable object threatens the way we learn it and the way we pay attention to the world and to otherness.

While attention is an individual experience, it is also organized and drawn collectively. Yves Citton shows that this collective attention provokes “striking effects of synchronicity”[6]. This synchronicity of attention allows us to act collectively, by being drawn to the same issues at the same moments. This is how the agora worked in Ancient Greece, and this is how information in newspapers, on television, on the radio and on the internet works today. Visibility always gave power since it makes one exists to the others, his messages can be spread and he can influence them. That’s why the ability to draw (and hold captive) attention has always been a valued capacity.

In ancient Greece, Plato was worried about a group of people that prized the ability to convince over truth. Those were the Sophists. People would pay them in order to learn their knowledge about attention grabbing. In a way, we could say that at that moment, an economy of attention already existed. This is not exactly how the contemporary economy of attention works, though. The economy of advertising really emerged during the industrial revolution, raising competition between companies, leading to a new need to be more visible than others. On 16 June, 1836, for the first time, Émile de Girardin included ads in his newspaper in order to lower its price. It allowed information to become more accessible for collective attention. Advertisers then produced more and more mediatic contents until some doubts were raised concerning the influence of those producers on the information displayed in wide-audience media. As we saw earlier, the environment we live in shapes our attention. If we mix this idea with the fact that attention is organized collectively, we can deduce that a mediatic environment has an impact on the way we see the world as a group of people.

In a text called “Mediology of attention regimes”[7], Dominique Boullier tries to determine, what mediatic environments exist and how they affect us. He defines four main mediatic regimes which are always mixed together but in different proportions; those are immersion, projection, fidelity and alert. An immersive environment is an environment in which we let our attention be grabbed because we don’t know what matters, like when we visit a country and don’t want to follow the tourist paths. On the contrary, projection would be an environment made readable by projecting what matters for us onto it. For example, we could turn on the GPS and look at a video of the top 5 things we should visit to know exactly what matters and what we should pay attention to. The fidelity regime would be an environment that keeps directing our attention toward a chosen subject, it could be a religion, political communication… Finally, the alert regime, which Dominique Boullier defines as the most important nowadays, is a regime in which our attention keeps being grabbed by newness and surprise, putting us in a position of uncertainty leading to stress and discontinuity.

The fact that our attention is more and more solicited by more and more content creators that transform it into money makes this statement quite convincing. Harmut Rosa comes to the same conclusion by analyzing the effects of acceleration[8] (which is a necessity in a capitalist system) on our relation to the world we live in. He argues that by occupying and dividing our attention more and more, the economy makes us lose the feelings of continuity and meaning since we feel like we need to keep moving to follow the acceleration of the world. He defines it as a state of “hyper accelerated immobilism”[9] that prevents us from reflecting upon our life and our true desires because we need to constantly act in the present to keep our professional and social position made unstable by acceleration and competition.

Even if we share the same mediatic regime collectively, each of us has a unique experience which defines a unique way of paying attention to the world. The invasion of the economy in our personal lives threatens the uniqueness of this experience, by standardizing the way we connect to the world, to information, and to others. According to Bernard Stiegler, a unique attention to the world allows us to interiorize collective information individually[10]. By ‘interiorizing’, he means that even if several people look at the same thing, they won’t retain the same information from it, because they will pay attention differently and confront what they see with what they already know. Interiorization is a long process which distinguishes information and knowledge; it implies reflection upon what we pay attention to and real comprehension. Acceleration and the attention-grabbing economy threaten interiorization: in an accelerated world, we can’t take the time to reflect upon what we see and read, since news ceaselessly keeps coming, and we need to follow these if we don’t want to run late[11]. The issue is that this interiorization is what allows us to individuate ourselves, to become more unique and complex while we go through time. It may explain why we feel like we are less and less in control of our attention and why we pay attention to things without really caring. A striking demonstration of this quick attention paid without caring is our reflex to “google it” when we don’t know something. We rarely do it to actually learn, we only fly over some information (the same as everyone else) that we don’t verify and don’t interiorize, just to be able to speak about something we don’t really know much about. Information soon to be forgotten. Individuation is a complex idea that defines an everlasting evolution of beings and it is quite hard to put words on what makes it possible, but we can see how the economy of attention could threaten this evolution by standardizing and accelerating our relation to the world.