Intro
The topics of attention / distraction / curiosity / vigilance have repeatedly become the focus of discussion over long periods of time. Be it vigilance against the temptations of the devil in the Middle Ages, the attentive lifestyle of the avant-garde of Protestantism, the shaping of modern subjectivity in the 19th century or the media disruptions of the present day.
The fact that the topic has been prominently discussed since the end of the 1990s is a reaction to digitalization in general. In recent years, it has become even more of a focus as a result of the negative developments in the field of social media and network capitalism as a whole. The clearly noticeable shortening of attention spans, especially among young people, has caused alarm in many cases, and following a number of scandals, the practices of trading in our data and the cynicism and ruthlessness of business models in surveillance capitalism have become more widely known and publicly criticized.
The fact that selling our time and attention to advertisers is the main source of income is not an innovation of the Internet era. At the latest with private television, some media structures were completely financially based on this. But in the WWW, social media and with the technical possibilities of the smartphone, the business model has developed in leaps and bounds and with the current decline of mainstream platforms – analyzed by Cory Doctorow as the 'enshittification lifecycle' – the effects on 'users' are becoming even more noticeable.
Non-profit internet projects, such as the Fediverse in the social media sector, are prerequisites for a way out of these structures. As far as our topic is concerned, however, these are only prerequisites for the time being. The attention economies of the monopolistic platforms shape the social media model down to the capillaries. These imprints do not disappear simply because the underlying economic objectives are not pursued in a non-profit project.
What the resistance to the sell-out of our attention might look like and what the counter-models might be is also not easy to answer. To simply want to 'reclaim our concentration' would be to vastly underestimate the complexity of the problem. It therefore seems necessary to take a closer and more detailed look at what exactly this phenomenon of 'attention' is all about, which has been made so completely quantifiable and transformed into a perfectly tradable commodity, especially in the last twenty years.
This blog is dedicated to this topic. The fact that it bears the title ‘zerstreuung’ (distraction) already shows that it is not simply about a straightforward strengthening of 'attention'. Whether this primarily means locating the questions on a continuum between attention and distraction, as Jonathan Crary has suggested, or focusing on distraction (to put it so contradictorily) is something I would like to clarify in the course of the research.
The starting point, as outlined above, is the current developments, which in retrospect may one day be seen as the beginning of the end of social media in the classic sense. I will come back to this again and again, but in the first phase I would like to concentrate on familiarizing myself with the history on the basis of a few selected books and texts, not least in the hope of coming across one or two historical texts that can open up a view of the current situation from a distance. From there, I will not only analyze possibilities for an Internet after social media, but also the broader environment of 'self-help' literature on concentration, for example, which is so often just a call for self-optimization.
Note on languages: The texts in this blog will be predominantly in English. But there is another language underneath it, which is German. That’s not just because I am based in Vienna and am a German native speaker, but I will follow a lot of German-language literature, because this discourse is rather specific and differs to quite some extent from the English/transnational one. I hope that linking these discourses can become an interesting aspect of this blog. But I am not a translator and will have to develop ways of dealing with this situation between the two languages.