I do think, however, that we need to consider the pattern Citton and Crary have, each in their own way, identified. I would describe the pattern this way: We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention. The interests served by this environment in turn pathologize the resultant inattention. These same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.

a problem whose centrality was directly related to the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input. Inattention, especially within the context of new forms of large-scale industrialized production, began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was the very modernized arrangements of labour that produced inattention.

Bradbury’s book is about an imposed and willful alienation from the world effected by media technologies. One scene in particular speaks directly to the question of attention. In it, the protagonist is trying desperately to commit to memory a passage of a book he must shortly surrender to the authorities. But his efforts are undone by an incessant advertising jingle blaring over the loudspeaker on the train he is riding. I think of this scene whenever I’m pumping gas and the screen on the pump starts up with a series of 20 second video ads.

The first is a 1961 short story written by the American author, Kurt Vonnegut. “Harrison Bergeron” is set in a dystopian future where equality is enforced by totalitarian means. The physically gifted, for example, were burdened with weights so as to neutralize their natural advantages. The advantages of the intellectually gifted were neutralized by other means.

A report by the Urban Institute found half those aged 18 to 34 were spending upward of 30% of their income on rent, making them “rent-burdened.”2 Meanwhile, median housing prices increased 28% in the last two years,3 pricing some out of the market.