The Attention Complex ― Media, Archeology, Method

In recent years a dramatic, ongoing transformation of human attention has been taking place. From the epidemic rise of ADHD to the invention of the 'attention economy,' a groundswell of new formal discourses and social practices have intensified scrutiny on attention as a problem within society that cuts across the sciences, art and design, media technology, popular culture, and the experience of everyday life. Rather than offer an explanation of this broad tendency that works from a premise of attention substantiated by concepts and theories of affect, cognition, neurobiology, visual culture, or economics, The Attention Complex unveils how our concepts and theories of attention are already imbedded in, and organized by a more general political function. This study demonstrates that the power of attention is not that which directs, imposes, intrudes, or confines some otherwise free or natural human capacity, but rather it traces how attention is produced from a complex of relationships that are immanent within knowledge systems that presume to explicate its true nature.

Kenneth Rogers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film at York University, Canada.