On the measure of attention. Epistemic vices from the totalitarian era to the digital public sphere

The impact of social media on the public sphere of democratic societies has prompted a debate on emerging new forms of manipulation of the public opinion. In a communicative infrastructure where anyone can fabricate and disseminate claims, the capacity to orient the public’s limited attention towards specific claims over others becomes crucial. The new social media act, in this sense, as grand technologies of attention that train the gaze of an immense public and then resell it for commercial and political purposes. Populist movements, authoritarian leaders and conspiracy theorists have been particularly effective at exploiting these systems worldwide. Their communicative style of simplification, emotionalization, and negativity operates in tune with the mechanisms upon which these platforms rely and performs efficiently in this new kind of “attention economy” where experts and traditional information providers struggle. Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt already explored the moral and political implications of attention in their analyses of 20th century authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Weil presented attention as a “non-acting action”, a contemplative kind of individual agency that is detached from the mechanisms of social idolatry and eludes the prejudices and reactions of the multitude (Weil 1950; 1952). Arendt argued that a “thinking attention” combines will and intellect into the capacity of judgment, which is crucial to overcome the threat of thoughtlessness and resist the “banality of evil” (Arendt 1963; 1978). Iris Murdoch later reprised Weil to identify attention as the “proper mark of the moral agent” (Murdoch 1970). These perspectives highlight the moral dimension of the “attention economy” that affects individuals in the space of mass communication: the excellent exercise of citizenship requires the ability to pay a right measure of our limited attention and avoid the opposite risks of lacking attention entirely –Arendt’s paradigmatic case of Eichmann’s thoughtlessness – or overburdening our attention with mechanisms of collective identification – Weil’s critique of political party activism. I suggest these insights have relevant (i) normative and (ii) interpretive implications for current debates: (i) Exceeding or falling short of what is right in the exercise of attention can be construed, in Aristotelian terms, as a pair of opposite epistemic vices that expose the citizen to an increased risk of political exploitation and manipulation. In a non-domination perspective (Pettit 1997; 2012), in fact, both tendencies render the citizen subject to the arbitrary influence of individuals, groups and institutions that exert their mastery through strategies of distraction and collective identification; (ii) These epistemic vices of attention seem correlated with the spread of the civic vice of polarization. In particular, the emergent “belief polarization” among the citizenry results from the undesirable convergence between phenomena of belief corroboration and group identification (Talisse 2019) to which social media strategies of attention manipulation and epistemic segmentation are instrumental (Aikin and Talisse 2019). As the infrastructures of social communication and political power change over time, the inner workings of the attention economy may change, but a virtuous exercise of attention remains a vital resource of citizenship in order to preserve the conditions of democratic rule.