Attensity!, 232: "[T]he attentional world we navigate today is monocultural: What we talk about when we talk about 'attention' is, in fact, just one very narrow and specific (if also, now, totally dominant) species. It is the kind of attention that has been cultivated by a century of industrial 'attention farming,' and we hardly remember all the other attentional modalities that it has displaced. Which attention has carpeted our landscape? The mechanomorphic, instrumentalized, stimulus-and-response kind of attention that became the central preoccupation of the military-industrail complex across the twentieth century. The kind of attention that focused on screen-vigilance (key for radar monitors and the monotonous labor of regulating machines), and the tap-click incorporation of human beings into cybernetic systems (key for shooting down enemy craft, or making timed decisions in complex models). This was the kind of attention studied in laboratories, quantified by advertisers, and now optimized by AI-driven search engine algorithms. And it is the kind of attention too many of us find ourselves trying to defend, or improve, or manage in our daily lives."
234: they argue that a deeper form of attention "has been plowed under by the industrial combines of our attentional monoculture: attention that isn't that narrow, determinate, track-and-trigger 'focus' that facilitates frictionless integration of humans and machines"
see separate note on "distraction"
see also 51: "a VAST RANGE OF HUMAN FACULTIES AND EXPERIENCES has been effectively collapsed into a single, narrow, cybernetic (i.e., machine-engaged), quantifiable, and ultimately always-already-instrumentalized THING--a thing we CALL 'attention.' and worry about as 'attention,' but that has as little to do with the true cosmos of human attention as a sex ed class has to do with human love. Which is to say, not nothing. But not that much, either." (emphases in original)
53: "[I]t is a deep and important fact that the vast majority of the research done on 'human attention' in the twentieth century was tightly tied to very practical problem concerning the stimulus-and-response capacities of human subjects sitting in front of machines"
see the study of "vigilance" and "human factors research"
see also their note on "attention span" (54): "earlier in the twentieth century the notion of an 'attention span' referred not to duration, but to the actual visual field in which a stimulus might appear--it was spatial")