Abstract
In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Aylsworth and Castro, In Journal of Applied Philosophy 38:662–673, 2021; Castro and Pham, In Philosophers’ Imprint 20:1–13, 2020; Williams, In Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, Cambridge University Press, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but selfcontrol, and addiction as well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth and Castro, In Journal of Applied Philosophy 38:662–673, 2021; Bhargava and Velasquez, In Business Ethics Quarterly 31:321–359, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, In Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Aylsworth and Castro, In Journal of Applied Philosophy 38:662–673, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, In Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, Cambridge University Press, 2018). Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency.
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Notes
These accounts of attention can be construed into two broad camps, inflationary accounts such as those proposed by Jennings (2020, 2022) and Watzl (2017, 2023) and deflationary accounts such as those proposed by Wu (2014, 2023) and Mole (2010, 2023). According to inflationary accounts, attention is an internally directed mechanism that orders and prioritizes mental states for the purposes of being selective in order to focus our behaviours and respond to the world around us. Attention is the basis of control on this account. For Watzl (2017, 2023), attention is the modification of mental priority structures. On this account, attention plays an early and explanatory role, internally ordering mental states and as such sitting atop a hierarchical control system. Jennings (2020, 2022) takes this a step further to suggest that attention is essentially linked to a self that modulates neural activity, with attentional control providing evidence of an emergent self that does the ordering of mental states. According to deflationary accounts, attention does not itself order mental states, rather attention is the result of the various influences of those mental states, with voluntary control, physical salience, bias, learning history, and more, all influencing where attention gets allocated. It is these many and varied influences of attention, brought into focus by deflationary accounts of attention, that many current accounts of the attention economy do not account for, resulting in not only empirically inadequate uses of attention, but self-control, and addiction as well. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for this distinction.
Importantly, I do not propose to offer a once and for all definition of addiction. Rather, my aim here is to highlight the shortcomings of one predominant way of discussing addiction, especially as it relates to problematic technology use.
Indeed, in some cases it may be correctly classified as such. However, the term addiction is used much too freely to describe all instances of problematic technology use.
I agree with this way of construing problematic technology use, but much empirical and conceptual work remains to be done to accurately and usefully explain the moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy in terms of habits. For example, are the kinds of habits associated with problematic technology use akin to a kind of ‘strategic automaticity’ (Jennings, 2020)? How much of the behaviour is automatic? Moreover, how does this kind of problematic technology use become habituated in the first place?
Crucially, I am not claiming here that the user “always has a choice”, especially as this kind of rhetoric is used to shoulder the responsibility of problematic behaviours solely on the user. Rather, what I am arguing is that it is not black and white – agency/choice are always at play to a greater or lesser degree. As outlined further below, compulsion and choice interact rather than merely compete. Moreover, the exercise of agency and recognition of responsibility does not mean that blame necessarily follows (Pickard, 2017).
Historical bias is discussed in further detail in Sect. 5, below.
Here, and throughout, when I use the word value I have in mind Glimcher and Ernst’s (2014, p.238) account of values and decision-making wherein values are signals “formed by the integration of different attributes of the options for choice at the time of decision making.” Similarly, Berkman et al., (2017, p. 423) define subject value as “the weighted sum of choice-relevant attribute values” tracked by neurons in a “noisy, probabilistic fashion” (italics in original). Crucially, these weights vary by person, context, and time.
Similarly to the discussion of habits above, problematic technology use may become relatively automatic (always picking up your phone and scrolling Instagram when at the dinner table, etc.) and so associated with system 1, but this does not account for the value-based, deliberative choices (associated with system 2) that led to the development of these seemingly automatic behaviours. Accounts such as Turel & Qahri-Saremi mistakenly assume that system 1 drives problematic technology use without accounting for how the behaviour developed. In other words, biases to act one way instead of another are taken to be automatic, without accounting for where these biases stem from.
Jenning’s (2020) discussion of strategic automaticity bears resemblance to Wu’s (2013) solution to the threat of automaticity. On Jenning’s account, strategic automaticity is a kind of control because “it uses experiences to determine the relevant stimulus–response pairing, rather than waiting for input from other neural areas” (Jennings, 2020, p. 188).
Philosophers have begun to question the distinctions well (Mole, 2023; Wu, 2023). Ganeri (2016,p. 63) writes: “The purported distinction between endogenous and exogenous which cognitive psychologists help themselves to brings with it far too many theoretical presuppositions to be helpful in the analysis of attention…”.
Crucially, the attention economy may not be representative of a specific, and recurring, distractor set that should enable users to more effectively exert attentional control because of the constantly changing content of the associated distractors. In other words, novelty may disrupt the ability of selection history to protect against distractors.
Crucially, we should not confuse the framework of the priority state space (PSS) with Watzl’s (2017, 2023) priority structure account of attention. The PSS captures the variety of influences and control structures that shape attention, instead of positing attention as the basis of control, as Watzl (2017, 2022) would have it.
I am not suggesting that all philosophers working on the ethics of the attention economy should stop what they are doing at once and take up some neuroscience. However, to the extent that the aim of the literature is to develop a robust account of the how the attention economy causes the harms that it does, an empirically responsible account of attention needs to be given. Further, there is much valuable philosophical work on the nature of attentional control and mental agency (Jennings, 2020; Wu, 2013, 2014, 2023) that warrants engagement from philosophers of technology writing about the attention economy.
To be clear, there are certainly limits on how much can be attended to at any given time. This is not being called into question here. What the ‘ego-depletion’ model states is that exerting attentional control at Time 1 would lead to the decreased ability to do so at Time 2, as if there were some pool that is drained by exerting control that one must wait to be refilled before using again.
Indeed, the very idea of an ‘attention economy’ rests on the idea of attention-as-resource.
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Dylan J. White is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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White, D.J. Paying attention to attention: psychological realism and the attention economy. Synthese 203, 43 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04460-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04460-4