Toward a History of Attention in Culture and Science

Abstract

As a direct effect of the omnipresence of the new media, attention has become a central focus of interest. Since the spectrum of visual stimuli and entertainment has become so broad, curiosity, pleasure and admiration are no longer regarded as virtues and passions to be stimulated and satisfied. The problem is rather how to acquire and manage more and more information in shorter and shorter periods of time. In this situation, attention is so precious and expensive, because it cannot be increased at one's discretion and it is a target for anyone who wants to "sell" goods, ideas, knowledge, or ideology. Authors such as Georg Franck speak of an "economy of attention" and regard it as a currency that makes it necessary to decide how to invest one's own attention and how to evoke the attention of others. Consequently Franck argues for a new "ethics of attention." 2 The length of TV-spots has regulated our visual attention; the permanent threat of cell-phones has affected our capacity for concentration in various social situations; and the use of computers inevitably trains us to bring our own attention and speed of response into correspondence with the commands and functions of the machine. Attention [End Page 670] today is inseparably linked to the conditions of information technology and media that surround us. However, attention is not an epiphenomenon of these media and technologies. In his comprehensive history of attention in modernity, Jonathan Crary argues that current patterns and mechanisms of attention are to be understood as a consequence of modern transformations of perception and of attention in the nineteenth century. 3 According to Crary, the goal was either to control the observer's subjective experience (e.g. with the tachistoscope and reaction time experiments), or to use attention as a dynamic system in order to enhance the capitalist world of goods, spectacle and consumption.