Cultural History of Attention: Part One

Crary’s Cultural History of Attention

Part One: The Attentive Subject

The cultural history of attentive subjects and attention media

Crary’s thesis has several components

Assumption• Attention = natural• Distraction = disruption

• No, distraction is a constitutive element of the many attempts to produce attentiveness in human subjects

• Modern distraction isn’t a disruption of stable or natural kinds of attention

Attention/Inattention

• Problem of attention is inseparable from inattention

• They are not polar opposites – they are a continuum p. 49

Hypnosis narrows the attention – recovering memories??

Doodling 'may help memory recall‘See BBC News Story

Becoming Attentive pp. 1-5

• The narrowing of attention (paying attention)

• The exclusion of the environment from consciousness

• Media technology increases attentiveness

Crary’s Thesis pp. 1-5

• Attentiveness as part of the disciplinary organization in

• Education• Labour

Pay Attention!!

Docile Bodies

Foucault's Docile Bodies

Techniques of Attention

Disciplinary Organization of Attention

• Linked to mass consumption

• From Victorian times to present day

Getting the Attention of Consumers

Disciplinary Organization of Attention

• Consumption increasingly experienced via the screen

Attention = not just about making the

subject “see”

mixed modalities of the senses

Includes other cognitive states such as trance and reverie (daydream)

Affective, non-cognitive states (Thrift)

Perception of media = mixed modalities of the senses

Attentive Subjects

• Institutional Power implicated in the production of the attentive subject

– Productive– Manageable– Predictable

History of Attention

Much earlier…

• It became imperative for thinkers of all kinds [e.g.Kant] to discover what faculties, operations, or organs produced or allowed the complex coherence or conscious thought. p. 15

Late 1700s

Kant 1724-1804 (idealism – ideas are what we know for certain)

Attention & Coherent Thought

• Attentive subject selects and isolates contents of a sensory field at the expense of others

• Attention represses disruptive forms of free association

• Focuses consciousness on some special direction

• The maintenance of an orderly and productive world

• Avoidance of meaningless reverie p. 17.

...late 1800s

• The problem of attention becomes a fundamental issue of society

• Inattention…began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem

Early Consumerism

Great Exhibition of 1851

Early Consumerism• Evolving Capitalism

continually pushes attention and distraction to new limits and thresholds

• Endless sequence of – new products– sources of stimulation– streams of information – new methods of

managing and regulating perception p. 14.

Scientific Research (think about relation to first paradigm of HCI)

• Attentiveness of the subject = site of – Observation– Classification– Measurement

• Testing of – Reaction times– Sensory and perceptual

sensitivity – Mental chronometry– Reflex action– Conditioned responses

A variety of cultural and philosophical understandings

1. Attention & Freewill

• Expression of the conscious will of an autonomous subject

• Freewill, choice and self-constituting freedom

A variety of cultural and philosophical understandings

2. Evolutionary Attention

• Biologically determined

• Instinctual, unconscious drives

• A remnant, as Freud and others believed, of our archaic evolutionary heritage, which inexorably shaped our lived relation to an environment.

A variety of cultural and philosophical understandings

3. Controlled Attentiveness

• Produced and managed through the knowledge and control of external procedures of stimulation

• Involving a wide-ranging technology of “attraction” p. 25

New Technology and Attention

Kaiserpanorama (Immersive 19th Century Media)

New Technology and Attention

Kaiserpanorama

Peep shows to Kinetoscope

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) demonstrated the Kinetoscope (a primitive film viewer) at his West Orange, New Jersey lab in 1889

The inventions and markets of attention machines

Edison realized the media marketplace

– Images– Sounds– Energy– Information

• Reshaped into measurable and distributable commodities Thomas Edison

The inventions and markets of attention machines

• … how a social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units of consumption

Thomas Edison

Hardware and Software…Edison understood the relations

between

– Hardware – Software

– Information – Visual images

• The making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption

Thomas Edison

Hardware and Software

• Edison’s inheritance

• Today the computer screen is the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption of electronic entertainment commodities p. 32

Attention and Distraction

Attention and Distraction“It is natural for the attention to be

distracted from one thing to another. As soon as the interest in one object has been exhausted, and there is no longer anything new in it to be perceived, it is transferred to something else, even against our will. When we wish to rivet it on an object, we must constantly seek to find something novel about it, and this is especially true when other powerful impressions of the senses are tugging at it and trying to distract it.” (Helmholtz cited in Crary p. 30)

German physicist H v Helmholtz (1821-1894 )

Attention and Distraction• . …the cultural logic of

capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another. …it created a regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction… p. 30

Attention and Distraction

…avid defenders of tech advance acknowledge that subjective adaptation to new perceptual speeds and sensory overload would not be without difficulties.p. 30

Attention and Distraction

• …modernization was not a one-time set of changes but an ongoing and perpetually modulating process that would never pause for individual subjectivity to accommodate and ‘catch up’ with it. p. 31

The Marketplace of Attention

. …the management of attention depends on the capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatternings of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed. p. 33.

Next Week

Part Two: Pathologies of Inattention, Freewill and Media Hypnosis

Stages

• Learning (week three)• Looking (week four)

• Asking (week five)• Trying (week six)

Looking (week four)

• ‘Observe people to discover what they really do—not what they say they do.’ People and Prototypes p. 673

http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/userobservation.htm

Four modes of looking

1. FLY ON THE WALL2. A DAY IN THE LIFE3. SHADOWING4. PERSONAL INVENTORY

FLY ON THE WALL

FLY ON THE WALL

• Observe and record behavior within its context, without interfering with people’s activities

• It is useful to see what people do in real contexts and time frames, rather than accept what they say they did after the fact

Uses?

• Moggridge’s Example

• By spending time in the operating room, the designers were able to observe and understand the information that the surgical team needed

A DAY IN THE LIFE

A DAY IN THE LIFE

• Catalog the activities and contexts that users experience for an entire day.

• This is a useful way to reveal unanticipated issues inherent in the routines and circumstances people experience daily.

Uses?

• Moggridge’s Example

• For the design of a portable communication device, the design team followed people throughout the day, observing moments at which they would like to be able to access information.

SHADOWING

SHADOWING

• Tag along with people to observe and understand their day-to-day routines, interactions, and contexts.

• This is a valuable way to reveal design opportunities and show how a product might affect or complement user’s behavior.

Uses?

• Moggridge’s example

• The team accompanied truckers on their routes in order to understand how they might be affected by a device capable of detecting drowsiness.

PERSONAL INVENTORY

PERSONAL INVENTORY

• Document the things that people identify as important to them as a way of cataloging evidence of their lifestyles.

• This method is useful for revealing people’s activities, perceptions, and values as well as patterns among them.

Uses?

• Example For a project to design a handheld electronic device, people were asked to show the contents of their purses and briefcases and explain how they use the objects that they carry around everyday.

TaskGet into groups of two - You are creating a lifestyle webzine

mainly about gadgets – Use a personal inventory to assess your target audience (each other)

Personal Belongings

List all of the communication products you use in a day.

Alarm clock (intrapersonal communication) – describe the alarm clock.Did you travel to work by (a) car or (b) train – Car, what car?What products do you use in the car, on the train? What functions?

etc.

Personal Characteristics

Complete the following sentences:

– I am happiest when I ...– What I like to do most is ...– I often wish I…– The best thing that ever happened to me ...– At my university I like to…– What I need most is ...– What I want most is ...– If I could be someone else, I ...

From the information captured what could you say about your target’s lifestyle and the products they would most likely consume?