Cultural History of Attention: Part One

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Cultural History of Attention Part One
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Crarys Cultural History of Attention

• Part One The Attentive Subject

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The cultural history of attentive subjects and
attention media
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Crarys 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 isnt a disruption of stable
  or natural kinds of attention

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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
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Becoming Attentive pp. 1-5

• The narrowing of attention (paying attention)
• The exclusion of the environment from
  consciousness
• Media technology increases attentiveness

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Crarys Thesis pp. 1-5

• Attentiveness as part of the disciplinary
  organization in
• Education
• Labour

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Pay Attention!! Docile Bodies
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Foucault's Docile Bodies
Techniques of Attention
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Disciplinary Organization of Attention

• Linked to mass consumption
• From Victorian times to present day

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Getting the Attention of Consumers
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Disciplinary Organization of Attention

• Consumption increasingly experienced via the
  screen

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Attention not just about making the subject
see
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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
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Attentive Subjects

• Institutional Power implicated in the production
  of the attentive subject
• Productive
• Manageable
• Predictable

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History of Attention
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Much earlier
Late 1700s

• 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

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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.

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...late 1800s

• The problem of attention becomes a fundamental
  issue of society
• Inattentionbegan to be treated as a danger and a
  serious problem

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Early Consumerism
Great Exhibition of 1851
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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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New Technology and Attention
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New Technology and Attention
Kaiserpanorama (Immersive 19th Century Media)
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Kaiserpanorama
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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
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The inventions and markets of attention machines

• Edison realized the media marketplace
• Images
• Sounds
• Energy
• Information
• Reshaped into measurable and distributable
  commodities

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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

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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
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Hardware and Software

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

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Attention and Distraction
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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 )
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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

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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

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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

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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.

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Next Week

• Part Two Pathologies of Inattention, Freewill
  and Media Hypnosis

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Stages

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

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

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Looking (week four)

• Observe people to discover what they really
  donot what they say they do. People and
  Prototypes p. 673

http//www.usabilitynet.org/tools/userobservation.
htm
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Four modes of looking

• FLY ON THE WALL
• A DAY IN THE LIFE
• SHADOWING
• PERSONAL INVENTORY

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FLY ON THE WALL
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FLY ON THE WALL

• Observe and record behavior within its context,
  without interfering with peoples 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

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Uses?

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

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A DAY IN THE LIFE
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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.

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Uses?

• Moggridges 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.

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SHADOWING
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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 users behavior.

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Uses?

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

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PERSONAL INVENTORY
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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 peoples
  activities, perceptions, and values as well as
  patterns among them.

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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.

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Task

• Get 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 ...