ATTENTION

Robert DiYanni, New York University
Ideas to Live By—Newsletter for Thinking [Designed for General Readers]
“What—Why—How?”—Key Questions for Life, Work, Leisure, and Learning.

Understanding ideas is essential for a thoughtful, flourishing life—an examined life worth living for pleasure and profit, a purposeful life of possibility, meaning, and value.
What key ideas and concepts would you need to understand and use for such a life?
Why might you value those ideas and concepts?
How could they help improve your personal, professional, and learning lives?

What is attention?

Attention is a familiar idea that presents a number of challenges. Although we know what it means to pay attention to something, sustaining our attention to things—especially to complex ideas and challenges—can prove difficult. To attend means more than simply to notice, though that is its starting point. We speak of “paying” attention—investing ourselves in “acts” of attention, which suggests that time and effort are necessary. Sustaining attention is what matters. Attention requires being present in the moment. We literally attend when we show up and are present. We attend more fully when our presence is more than physical, when we are being mentally present as well. Attention involves focus, and it requires consistency in maintaining that focus on whatever has attracted our attention in the first place, whether by choice or necessity. Focused attention is especially important for meditating, whatever style and type of meditation we might practice.

Why is attention important?

Attention is important because it forms the basis for perception and for understanding based on our perceptions. We can’t say much about something we haven’t noticed carefully. We can’t think well about things we haven’t observed with some degree of attention. In short, careful attention forms the foundation for our better and deeper thinking. Developing our capacity to attend assiduously to things we see and hear enables not only our best thinking, but also makes us more interesting to ourselves and others. We can share what we notice, forming the basis for productive conversations. And we can connect things we notice on one occasion—from direct observation, from our reading and research, from engaging with others—with things we notice elsewhere, on other occasions. From those connected observations we draw inferences about their significance and value—and their meaning. Our carefully attended observations ground our interpretations of all manner of things. We simply can’t do much without attention.

How can we use attention effectively?

We can use attention effectively and productively by slowing down, by becoming more deliberate and intentional about our observations. Slowing ourselves down to pay attention enables us to notice details that might be overlooked when we look and listen more quickly and with less care. Noticing details can be enhanced by having a method for attending, for paying attention—whatever its source. We can learn to attend better through practice, to learn to see and hear more of what we look at and listen to through being conscious of what we are doing when we attend. In reading a poem, for example, we can start simply by making observations about it—its stanzas (or lack of them); its line lengths; its images and figurative language; its speaker and tone; its sentences and syntax, or order of words in its sentences; in the kinds of words and overall language it includes. All this as the basis for the connections we would notice among those detailed observations. And then the inferences we can draw from our connected observations of the poem’s details to arrive at a provisional conclusion, or interpretation, of it.

Going Further with Attention. From Robert DiYanni's Thinking Through Words, Routledge, 2026.

The Problem of Attention

A critical aspect of social media that demands its own set of considerations, attention is the new coin of the realm. “Attention,” suggests Chris Hayes in The Siren’s Call, “is the substance of life,” since all of our waking lives “we are paying attention to something.” (3). Complicating things is whether we are attending to something consciously chosen or to something that has either seduced or compelled our attention. What we attend to matters because what we decide to invest our attention in constitutes, essentially, who we are; “attention,” Hayes argues “constitutes our very self.” And it is this self that has been violated, assaulted, conscripted, captured by powerful forces competing for our attention from every direction at every moment. Advertisers want our attention, as do politicians; influencers seek our attention, as do narcissists and their ilk who engage in outrageous acts to secure it.

Not only what we attend to matters greatly, but how we attend to it, how diligently, capaciously, deeply. As does to whom we attend and what quality of attention we accord and afford them. Attention structures our personal lives and our social lives, our private lives and our public lives. It provides the foundation for our relationships. To the extent that we control our attention, we control our lives; to the extent that others control our attention, we give over that control to outside forces vying for it, competing for it in an unrelenting pursuit of commodification and commercialization. 

It is not merely time today that is money; attention is money, valued because it can be bought and sold for profit. The value of attention, moreover, is directly related to its scarcity, as this precious human resource is limited.

What plagues so many people today is an inability to sustain their attention on any single object for more than the briefest time span. Those who scroll constantly through TikTok videos, seduced by various forms of clickbait, who need the constant stimulation of the anticipated dopamine hit—these have lost their ability to focus, having succumbed to myriad forms of distraction, their attention spans constantly shrinking. 

The loss and degradation of attention, serious and sustained attention to things that should matter most in our lives, has become for many not just a personal liability, but an existential threat. It threatens to abort their individual human potential as well as their intellectual and social development as functioning, productive members of society.  

In the same ways that industrialization resulted in the commodification of work—turning it into labor, Hayes argues, so has the commodification and commercialization of attention degraded it as a human resource. In both instances, he suggests, updating Karl Marx, that people have lost autonomy and meaning; they have become alienated from their attention as they have become alienated from their work. 

An additional insidious element of relentless attention capture by corporations selling out our attention is its balkanization, with resulting isolation of individuals into their own distinct attention cocoons. Attention, more and more breeds solitariness—and loneliness. What we once attended to together—movies, for example, we now more often watch alone. 

We are quickly becoming information machines, our bits and bytes sourced to the highest and most predatory bidders. Practicing a brand of “surveillance capitalism,” those attention predators provide ever more kinds of information to distract and entice such that information consumes our attention. (164). 

The economics of goods and services has morphed into an economics of attention, with the market focused on how attention, even more than information, is secured and traded for profit. We have entered, Hayes suggests, the age of attention.

And now a bit more, from A. O Scott, culture critic for the New York Times.

As a critic, which is to say someone whose job is to pay attention to things, and as a reader of criticism, which means someone who pays attention to the ways attention is paid, I’ve been fixated recently on the works of John Berger.

Berger, a British art critic, novelist and political polemicist who died in 2017, devoted much of his writing life to the theory and practice of looking — at paintings, at animals, at the natural world. This wasn’t merely an aesthetic preoccupation. “You can’t talk about aesthetics,” he wrote, “without talking about the principle of hope and the existence of evil.” Attention, for him, was a matter of life and death, or at least of their cultural equivalents, remembering and forgetting.

One of my favorite Berger essays, first published in 1973, is called “Between Two Colmars.” It recounts his experience of going to see a renaissance altarpiece near that Alsatian cathedral town in 1963, and again 10 years later. I’ve never been to Colmar, and there’s no picture of the altarpiece, which was painted by the German master Matthias Grunewald, in the edition of “About Looking” that I’m consulting. I could search online, of course (something I couldn’t have done when the piece first appeared or when I first read it a decade or so later), to see what Berger was talking about. But I don’t think I’ve ever done that, because even though he describes the altarpiece in careful detail — “It was painted on hinged panels of wood. When these were shut, those before the altar saw the Crucifixion, flanked by St. Anthony and St. Sebastian. When the panels were opened, they saw a Concert of Angels and a Madonna and Child, flanked by an Annunciation and Resurrection” — what matters to me more is his experiences of looking at it….

Berger trained as a painter before shifting to criticism. For him, attention was not a passive, individual state but rather an action. We don’t just see what’s in front of our eyes. We interpret it, looking for patterns and meanings and associations. How we do this depends on where we are, who we’re with and how we see ourselves….

The peasant’s survival depends on attention: to the weather; to customs and traditions; to a host of practical considerations that are also aesthetic and ethical choices. How do you plant a field? Build a chair? Raise a child? Mourn the dead?

The knowledge that provides answers to those questions is acquired by paying attention, in a way that is not qualitatively different from what a painter brings to a landscape or a critic to a painting.

That is what we are at risk of losing. Or what, Berger might say, is being stolen from us, not least by the technologies that offer us endless novelty and seem to fulfill desires we never even knew we had. The loss is a foreclosure of memory, of the knowledge that we exist in history.

And one more morsel.

Attention Villanelle
By Robert DiYanni

Don’t let anybody steal your attention.

It’s too valuable a commodity.

Protect yourself. Engage in prevention.

 

Big tech is eager to get you addicted.

Their websites claim you for a fearsome fee—

To control the asset of your attention.

 

They do it subtly with every intention

of securing your looks and likes—the key

to hold you there. Engage in prevention.

 

Google and Twitter and Instagram, too—

all want your eyeballs on sites you should flee.

Don’t let those thieves purloin your attention.

 

Be vigilant, avoid their click-baited

hooks to snare you by deliberate degree. 

Flee their enticements. Engage in prevention.

 

Attention is your most valuable asset.

Don’t squander it with prodigality.

Don’t let anyone steal your attention.

Protect yourself. Engage in prevention.

Recommended Readings:

• Carr, Nichols. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Norton, 2010.
• Hayes, Chris. The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Penguin, 2025.
• Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads. Knopf, 2016.