Last semester, our FYC students read an article by William Deresiewicz that indicted the dangers posed to the focused and individually attentive reflective mind by today’s digital technologies of multitasking. I’ve been thinking about that article more lately, both in the way that it intersects with my concerns of the economic valuation of writing as a form of immaterial labor and in the way it intersects with other articles I’ve been reading about the our evolving understanding of the function of attention. N. Katherine Hayles usefully outlines (behind a paywall, but partially available here) the binary of “Deep Versus Hyper Attention” (to be taken with all the usual necessary Derridean caveats about binaries), Eric Gordon and David Bogen investigate how we might rethink configuring the parameters of situations requiring (forms of) attention (and in so doing lead me to other interesting things to read on the topic), and Christine Rosen offers a perhaps more balanced critique than she usually does but one that engages in much of the sloppiness (track her use of the word “this”) typical to arguments over technologies of attention. (When Deresiewicz came to talk to our FYC students, he wound up hyper-qualifying so much of his argument as to essentially offer nothing beyond the blandest platitudes.) Attention is such a protean thing that it skates away like mercury, as Gordon and Bogen do an excellent job of showing. One good point, though, that Rosen starts to get at and that Hayles try to set up some limits for is the definition of “multi-” in our use of the attention-related term “multi-tasking.” What exactly counts as “multi-tasking,” anyway?
For some of the participants in the debate (Rosen and Deresiewicz in particular), the digital technologies that serve today as the most obvious tools for multitasking — the ones we most readily notice — become metonyms for the activity: if you’re doing more than one thing at once with a technology that didn’t exist ten years ago, you’re multitasking. On the other hand, if you’re reading a bedtime story for a child who’s sitting in your lap — in other words, engaging in the data-processing activities of taking in words and pictures, understanding the relations between them, performing them for an audience, monitoring that audience’s affective response to your performance, assessing your interpersonal interaction with that audience, while at the same time engaging in the kinesthesia of making that audience comfortable and relaxed while sitting in your lap, turning the pages, and keeping the book at an appropriate eye level — well, no, that’s not multitasking; that’s reading a bedtime story.
What happens, I think, is the same thing that folks who do work with digital technologies have known for a long time: the digital tools make relations and activities formerly taken for granted newly visible. To borrow from C. Paul Olson again, digital technologies replace labor-intensive processes with capital-intensive processes. As a form of immaterial labor, paying attention is work, but as anyone who uses Google Reader (or any RSS aggregator knows), paying attention is itself something that can be streamlined and compressed via technology into what feels like firehose force. Richard Lanham offered at least a good start in The Economics of Attention: information is (in many contexts today) hardly a scarce commodity. The problem Lanham ran into was an excessive focus on those two areas of neoclassical economic interest: scarcity and commodities. His proposed solution was to examine how we redistribute attention as a scarce commodity, which I think goes in the wrong direction: attention is not a commodity. It’s a form of work; of labor.
As such, attention requires examination and conceptualization as a factor of economic production. While I’m not in any way suggesting here that I adhere to a labor theory of value, I do think that understanding the work of attention as a form of immaterial labor and thereby as a form (at least in some cases) of production results in the phenomenon of multitasking showing itself as a sort of Sraffian aggregation problem.
(As I work through the ideas above, I’m realizing even more that my dissertation work gave me a glimpse of only the tiniest corner of the types of questions that I want to investigate. What I’m increasingly asking myself as I do so is: why? What do I hope to learn? What types of questions — yes, hello, stasis — do I want to pursue? Am I interested in how the work described above happens? No, that’s a problem of production, of techné.
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