The politics of attention – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Pay Attention to How You Pay Attention

“Attention is not neutral,” Antón Barba-Kay, a philosopher at University of California, San Diego, writes in “A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation.” “It is the act by which we confer meaning on things and by which we discover that they are meaningful, the act through which we bind facts into cares.” When we cede control of our attention, we cede more than what we are looking at now. We cede, to some degree, control over what we will care about tomorrow. The politics of attention are on my mind because a recent court case has sharpened the need to describe what, exactly, has gone wrong in our digital lives. ….[READ]