Cultural History of Attention: Part Two

Crary’s Cultural History of Attention

Part Two: Pathologies of Inattention, Freewill and Media Hypnosis

The pathologizing of inattention

• Attention posed as normative and implicitly natural function

• Its impairment (inattention) disrupts social cohesion p. 35

• See Kant from last week

“normalizing judgments”

Foucault's Disciplinary Society (Discipline and Punish, 1975)

Discipline = imposing precise norms (“normalization”)

Normative judgments = normal/abnormal

Practices in institutions - schools, prisons, hospitals/clinics etc

Crisis with Attention Spans(shorter lectures, use of games..)

Inattention and Discipline

Inattention Pathologized

• ADD/ADHD is characterized by

– Short attention span– Impulsiveness– Low frustration tolerance – Distractibility– Aggressiveness – Varying degrees of hyperactivity

• …linked to feeling of underachievement

Diagnosing ADD & ADHD -• Problems with jobs or

careers; losing or quitting jobs frequently

• Problems doing as well as you should at work or in school

• Problems with day-to-day tasks such as doing household chores, paying bills, organizing things

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/adhd_add_diagnosis.htm

Diagnosing ADD & ADHD -

• Problems with relationships because you forget important things, can't finish tasks, or get upset over little things

• Ongoing stress and worry because you don't meet goals and responsibilities

• Ongoing, strong feelings of frustration, guilt, or blame

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/adhd_add_diagnosis.htm

Inattention Pathologized

• At the extreme Crary points to the use of neuro-chemicals to control attention pp. 36-37

• Further production of attentive, yet docile subjects…

Attention Drugs• Psychostimulants are the primary

drugs used to treat ADHD

• Although these drugs stimulate the central nervous system, they have a calming effect on people with ADHD and work on attention

– Methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta, Metadate, Daytrana)

– Dexmethylphenidate (Focalin) – Amphetamine-

Dextroamphetamine (Adderall) – Dextroamphetamine (Dexedrine,

Dextrostat)

ADHD Generation

Paradox

• ADHD = attention deficit

• Yet, Crary argues that in many cases

• ‘… sufferers able to sustain attention watching TV and playing video games’ (p. 37).

Video Games Cause ADHD?

ADHD generation ?

Video Games Cure ADHD

Return to Crary’s Historical Perspective

• Locates the failure of 19th century scientific psychology to empirically determine attention

• …disaggregate it from states of distraction, reverie, dissociation and trance Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Reverie 1868

Attention/Distraction

• ‘… [the failure of] the great dream…”

• Liberated

• “Subject of his own liberty and of his own existence.”

Reverie by Adolphe Etienne Piot (1850-1910)

Freewill?

• ‘…attention was shown to contain within itself the condition for its own undoing…

• Attentiveness… continuous with…

– Distraction– Reverie– Dissociation– Trance

pp. 45-46

Freewill?

• ‘Attention finally could not coincide with a modern dream of autonomy.’ p. 45-46

Return to Crary’s Thesis (from last week)

• Problem of attention is inseparable from inattention

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

Attention and Distraction are “Normal”

“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… Crary, p. 30

Media Hypnosis

Hypnosis

• ‘Perhaps nowhere else in the late nineteenth century is the ambivalent status of attention as visible as in the social phenomenon of hypnosis.’ p. 65

Hypnosis

• The border between a focused normative attentiveness and a hypnotic trance was indistinct

Hypnosis

• Attention = a gateway to some vaguely understood but qualitatively different state from what had been understood as consciousness. p. 66

Hypnosis

Hypnosis also made clear the attentive states could be

delineated in terms of absorption, dissociation, and

suggestibility p. 67.

Same paradox?• …hypnosis involved

• narrowing of attention

paradoxically

• subject able to expand their awareness, in effect to see and remember more… p. 68

Crary’s reference to Gabriel Tarde

First published in French in 1890 Republished in the US in 1903

Gabriel Tarde’s Society of Imitation

Gabriel Tarde’s Society of Imitation

The social defined as:

A propensity for social subjects to engage in conduct considered ‘automatic’ and ‘involuntary’

Gabriel Tarde’s Society of Imitation

The social subject ‘unconsciously and

involuntarily reflects the opinion of others, or allows an action of others to be suggested to him… he imitates this idea or act

(Tarde in the preface to The Laws of Imitation).

Late 18th Century Media

‘In this singular condition of intensely concentrated attention, of passive and vivid imagination, these stupefied and feverish beings inevitably yield themselves to the magical charm of their new environment' Tarde cited in Crary p. 240

From Tarde’s Laws of Imitation p.199 Second Edition

Late 18th Century Media

‘…We know how credulous and docile the hypnotic subject becomes…We know, too, how deeply the personality which is suggested to him becomes incarnated in him. We know that at first it penetrates, or appears to penetrate into his very heart and character before it expresses itself in his posture or gesture or speech.’

(

From Tarde’s Laws of Imitation p.199 Second Edition and cited in Crary p. 240

Tarde the “New” Media Theorist

• Tarde = a forefather of mass media persuasion theory…

Viral Media Theory?• Tarde challenged the

notion that ideas spread by means of external institutional power alone

• Tarde suggests a hypnotic mediated influence, spreading point-to-point (See Thrift, 2008 pp. 232-233).

Rumour mills?

Echo chambers?

Viral marketing?

Network Society?

Nature/Culture

Imitative Rays

Emotional Signals

Thrift’s economy of

affective contagion

New Media Persuasion?

Media Hypnosis• Just as photographic and

cinematic innovation in the 1880s and 1890s defined the terms of an automation of perception

• hypnosis too…was a technology that offered at least the fantasy of rendering behavior both automatic and predictable

Media Hypnosis

…hypnosis abruptly disappeared from the mainstream of institutional practice and research in 1900 p.

69

Around the same time that cinema emerged

Cinema

Television

Television

Emerged as the most pervasive and efficient system for the management of attention

• So fully integrated into social and subjective life that certain kinds of statements about television

• Addiction• Habit• Persuasion• Control

• are in a sense unspeakable, effectively excluded from public discourse. p. 71

Technological Unconsciousness

The Module Debate

Freewill?

Cognitive modes of attentionAwarenessAttraction Association

Memory

Hypnotic transmission InattentionDistraction

DisassociationSomnambulism

Freewill & Imitation?Thrift argues that in Western culture especially - imitation/suggestion is a “painful realization”.

How little our thinking and emotions are actually ‘ours’

Painful realization that imitative tendencies (unconscious and automatic) apply to us

Nigel Thrift’s Shift from Cognitive to Noncognitive Arenas

• Thrift’s critique of academic focus on cognition (attention, awareness, memory)

• Only 5% of embodied thought is cognitive

• 95% non-cognitive sensory

• Introduces role of affect in design

finally

• Look at the extent to which technologies of attention have evolved

• See Neuromarketing• See EEG• See eyetracking test

Attention Technologies: Eye Tracking

• Low-cost Remote Eyetracking Client/Server Model http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PW4WrUeSoAY&feature=related

More Links• http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lo_a2cfBUGc&feature=related• http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xKdOMgu0C5Q&NR=1• http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sVXjMXnU56E&feature=related• http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bZOVcmwHZZk&feature=related

Stages

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

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

ASKING (week five)

• ‘Enlist people’s participation to elicit information relevant to your project.’

Moggridge’s Designing Interactions. Chapter Ten, People and Prototypes p. 673

ASKING

Four modes of asking

1. CONCEPTUAL LANDSCAPE (mental models)

2. COLLAGE3. FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS4. CARD SORT

CONCEPTUAL LANDSCAPE

• Ask people to diagram, sketch, or map the aspects of abstract social and behavioral constructs or phenomena.

• This is a helpful way to understand people’s mental models of the issues related to the design problem.

Uses?

• Designing an online university, the team illustrated the different motivations, activities, and values that prompt people to go back to school

COLLAGE

COLLAGE

• Ask participants to build a collage from a provided collection of images and to explain the significance of the images and arrangements they choose.

• This illustrates participants’ understanding and perceptions of issues and helps them verbalize complex or unimagined themes.

Uses?

• Example: Participants were asked to create a collage around the theme of sustainability to help the team understand how new technologies might be applied to better support people’s perceptions.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS

• Cross-cultural design

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS

• Request input from coworkers and contacts in other countries and conduct a cross-cultural study to derive basic international design principles.

• This is a good way to illustrate the varied cultural and environmental contexts in which the products are used.

Uses?

• Example A global survey about personal privacy helped to quickly compile images and anecdotes from the experiences of the correspondents.

CARD SORT

CARD SORT

• On separate cards, name possible features, functions, or design attributes. Ask people to organize the cards spatially, in ways that make sense to them.

• This helps to expose people’s mental models of a device or system. Their organization reveals expectations and priorities about the intended functions.

http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/cardsorting.htmFree card sort software:

http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/WebTools/WebCAT/overview.htmlUseit article

Uses?

• Example In a project to design a new digital phone service, a card-sorting exercise enabled potential users to influence the final menu structure and naming.

Task: LeavingUni.com card sort

• Handout for User Groups

• Handout for Design Groups