6/26/2018 Attention Meddling
This shape-shifting, label-swapping, category-defying demon -- recently vilified in its ominous-sounding personification as FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) -- has industrialized and increasingly automated the subversion of human attention to aid in the production of ignorance. Still, “attention economy” doesn’t rank high on lists of trending topics. It is hidden in plain sight, and it requires a new sociology/criminology of ignorance to help people and organizations create an upgraded security perimeter and virus defense around their attention. Without the added layer of security, attention is routinely hijacked and vampirized. In the Attention Economy, what appears to happen distracts us from the happenings that matter. What the media reports is a distraction from what it doesn't report. What we are talking about obscures what we are not talking about. How the magic trick appears to work distracts us from how it actually works. The magician's job is merely to manipulate our attention so as to compel us to notice the former, not the latter. The bracketing of time is an essential part of the trick, as explained by Apollo Robbins in this video. In every domain of knowledge and inquiry, these sleights of hand serve to engineer and exploit ignorance about the myriad ways, big and small, in which our attention is stolen from us and often pressed into the service unholy causes. After decades of the War on Drugs, we seem oblivious to the unchecked assault on human attention (and agency) by the most toxic drug on the market: the opiate of corrupted information. The assault remains unchecked and unnoticed largely because of hubris and a deep discomfort with examining the limits of human awareness. So, what happens in societies, organizations or individual lives when infobese human agents can no longer provide informed consent in the allocation of their attention? They surrender their sovereignty and increasingly exemplify the prophetic resonance of the following passage from one of the Founding Fathers of modern propaganda: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” Comments are closed.
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