“Attention has become a rare resource”
Yves Citton’s short history of attention deficit
Interview by Philippe Nassif
The digital world has been exploiting our attention as a resource, according to the Swiss philosopher Yves Citton. To save ourselves from dispersion, he says, we need to move towards an “ecology of attention”.
In your work you talk of an attention crisis which is much older than the advent of information technology…
Yves Citton : That’s right. Because of the great number of books being published during the Renaissance, new editing tools were developed, like headings and summaries, to deal with the increasing tendency towards distraction. But the real turning point was the rise of industrial capitalism in the 1880s, as Jonathan Crary points out in Suspensions of Perception (MIT Press, 2001). The first challenge was to channel the attention of workers on monotonous and repetitive assembly lines. Then an array of new media emerged, with newspapers published on a large scale, as well as films, radio, and television, which could attract the attention of masses from a distance. Through them, the attention of the consumer can be caught and controlled, in order to sell mass-produced merchandise. So from the start you see a circular process of attention-control, which is enhanced with every innovation…
