The Battle for Attention

There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally consi... See more

“Eye tracking is not attention, in a number of important ways,” he told me. “You can look without seeing—and you can see without looking.”

The passage touched a memory for me. Years earlier, I had heard of something called the Order of the Third Bird—supposedly a secret international fellowship, going back centuries, of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists. Participants in the Order would converge, flash-mob style, at museums, stare intensely at a work of art ... See more

attention is a way of prioritizing and tuning sensory data