I had some revelation about attention, but I can't remember it
now. Let's see if it comes up if I just write about it anyway.
I guess there are times in history where a natural resource is
discovered, or rather the way to turn that resource into money,
power or prestige. Some of these resources become so dominant
in the culture that the whole era becomes defined by the use
and trade of that resource. For example, during the Cold War,
information was the resource, and delays in information transfer
became existential issues at times.
I don't know if anyone could argue against us being in the era of
attention at the moment. At least it has to be a large theme
inside the defining grand theme, if it isn't the grand theme
itself. Or we could say that the elites of all powerful nations
are in the era of attention.
The shift from information to attention is an interesting area
phenomenologically speaking. In my subjective field, information
that could be manipulated in the past era was not a large chunk
of all the information that I could take in at any moment. Maybe
it was the newspaper, the tv and the radio. These would trickle
into the conversations of the people around me, and there used
to be a time, not long ago, when people would go to the office,
and they knew beforehand what everyone else would be talking
about. It's what was in the news.
Maybe the above list makes it seem like almost everything was
in the domain of information that could be manipulated and used
as a resource. But no, compared to attention, information was
just the thinnest slice of manipulatable surface.
Now, attention is the area of view. In other words, you may have
information that fills 5% of someone's daily attention, but if
you can control their attention, you may narrow their scope,
so to speak, and while you don't increase the amount of your
manipulated information, you make it's relative weight higher,
let's say to 10%.
The narrowing of the view happens in an almost contradictory
manner by creating stronger and stronger funnels of information.
It might seem at first that by going to Facebook you get access
to a wider range of information than you previously had, but
that isn't true. Facebook makes your social connections more
uniform than before. The information is more uniform. This
allows the company to trade more of your attention, since you
don't have to pay attention to the subtle nuances of real
communication with people. The people are there only to bring
you in.
Let's jump to the deep end. Attention is sacred. I don't mean this
in exclusively spiritual way, but you may take it like that as
well.
I have been living a very simple existance after my break
up and I have come to appreciate the simple objects I can use
to solve everyday problems. I have a carpet on the floor, with
a simple pillow. It makes you think of a meditation spot, but
usually that is where I sit cross-legged to eat my dinner over
an Ikea bed serving tray on legs. The "dinner space" is created
by attention to that spot, and it needs some symbols in order to
become the space. It needs the pillow and it needs the tray.
In the evening I try to keep my light intake as small as possible
to sleep better, so I have one candle that I use to read. This
is also a symbol. The candle means I have moved to a different
time of the day, and there are different activities. The possible
foci of attention are a lot more limited, and that is a good
thing.
These are ways to control my attention. The difference with this
compared to the normal capitalist system is that I am not buying
a sofa as a symbol of space. Sofa controls the space, while a
pillow can be moved to another spot and it becomes a different
symbol. My symbols of attention are movable in space and time.
At certain times that floor is the dining hall, at different
times it is a space I do stretches in. I have taken control of
attention on a deeper level than just buying a sofa.
I think I started realizing this during covid at the countryside.
You need to pay attention to the things that are keeping you
running. Unfortunately in city life the things are kept out of
your control. I am trying to bring some of that sort of attention
in by taking care of the cleanliness of the appliances and the
apartment. I have never been "automatically" good at such things,
as some people are, but I think this sacralization mindset helps
me maintain the habit.
How do these things connect, the big and the small picture? We
live in an age of attention wars. I am making myself more
resilient by focusing on more traditional ways of using my
attention and also not giving my attention to things willy-nilly.
There are huge worlds of information available that are not
being actively used to control your attention. For example,
I have started reading the classics, like Dostoyevsky and Asimov.
I have also started listening to music based on it's year of
publication. I started from 1967 since I have some strange
affinity with that whole time period of the late 60s and the 70s.
I am hoping to go through the years one by one, listening to the
most popular albums and get some sort of feeling for the times.
There are people here who watch old movies and collect old
snippets of information. I think all that is a part of
the humble resistance that one can take in their own life.
I think anything older than 50 years should be "clean" of the
attention manipulation, since even if it had some manipulation
in it's own context, it would have been information manipulation
and since it is old enough, we are probably immune to the attempt
either due to the methods being outdated, or the context being
so different that it is not useful for anyone anymore even if
our information landscape is being slightly shifted towards a
direction that from present moment looks more random than
anything.
