Roots Of Attention Distraction

Lost in an avalanche of "evidence", one forgets to ask the simple question - What is attention for? 

Is the current technology the cause of our lack of awareness and perpetual attention distraction? 

If that's the case, then we should have reached moral utopia millennia ago (given social media and video games are mere recent entrants). Clearly, utopia didn't dawn and we are still stuck in moral stone age.  Deep thinkers and realists were always a rare commodity. 

May be, we don't know what to do with our attention. What if we are viscerally convinced that our distractions deserve our most precious attention?

L.M. Sacasas ponders: 

As I see it, there is a critical question that tends to get lost in the current wave of attention discourse: What is attention for? Attention is taken up as a capacity that is being diminished by our technological environment with the emphasis falling on digitally induced states of distraction. But what are we distracted from? If our attention were more robust or better ordered, to what would we give it? Pascal had an answer, and Weil did, too, it seems to me. I’m not so sure that we do, and I wonder whether that leaves us more susceptible to the attention economy. Often the problem seems to get framed as little more than the inability read long, challenging texts. I enjoy reading long, challenging texts, and I do find that, like Carr and Hari, this has become more challenging. But I don’t think reading long, challenging texts is essential to human flourishing nor the most important end toward which our attention might be ordered.

We have, it seems, an opportunity to think a bit more deeply not only about the challenges our techno-social milieu presents to our capacity to attend to the world, challenges I suspect many of us feel keenly, but also about the good toward which our attention ought to be directed. What deserves our attention? What are the goods for the sake of which we ought to cultivate our capacity for attention?

On this score, attention discourse often strikes me as an instance of a larger pattern that characterizes modern society: a focus on means rather than ends. I’d say it also illustrates the fact that it is far easier to identify the failures and disorders of contemporary society than it is to identify the goods that we ought to be pursuing. In “Tradition and the Modern Age,” Hannah Arendt spoke of the “ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not ‘What are we fighting against’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’”