Collective Nostalgic Attention and Working-Class Identity
Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) and Leonie Smith (Lancaster University)
In recent years, philosophers have provided accounts of the ways in which social patterns of salience may wrong people. These include accounts of the epistemic harms of finding the wrong features of people salient (Whiteley 2022; 2023), not paying people enough attention (Smith & Archer 2020), or violating relationship-based attention duties (Saint-Croix 2022). In this paper we argue that patterns of collective attention can also bring about ontological harms by threatening the continued existence of a group as a social category. Specifically, when collective, harmful, mis-directed attention is provided by middle-class actors toward a working-class industrial past, it can constitute a harmful form of collective nostalgic attention, in which the past is, effectively, rewritten. Further, the harms in this case are not only towards those who are misremembered, forgotten, or frozen in time, they are also towards present-day working-class actors: the social and political reality of both past and present is at stake. The result is an existential harm to individual members of the working-class present, and to the boundaries and scope of collective working-class identity, with negative repercussions for both working-class self-identification and for their epistemic and political agency. We conclude by considering how this form of damaging collective attention might be resisted.
What is Collective Attention?
Katharine Browne (University of Oslo)
It is natural to speak of groups or collectives paying attention to certain things, and to make normative judgements about what groups should attend to. We might, for example, say of a hiring committee that they ought to have paid more attention to certain features of a candidate’s qualifications, or to criticize the amount of collective attention paid to celebrity gossip relative to the plight of refugees as unjust. But what does it mean for a collective to pay attention? While there is a well-established literature on collective belief and joint attention, to date there is no sustained discussion of the nature and normative significance of collective attention. This paper provides such an account. I distinguish different types of collective attention corresponding to the attention of non-structured groups (e.g., members of the public) and structured groups (e.g., committees). I focus on the latter and draw on Margaret Gilbert’s work on collective belief to provide a non-summative account to explain the collective attention of structured groups. I end by sketching a generalization of this account to explain other forms of collective attention, including public attention and joint attention. The result is a unified non-summative account of collective attention that captures a wide variety of group-level attentional phenomena.
The Ethics of Agenda Setting
Zsolt Kapelner (University of Oslo)
In social and political science “agenda setting” refers to the process through which certain issues emerge in public discourse and policymaking as salient objects of attention, while others are neglected or ignored. In democratic societies agendas emerge from the interaction of individuals and groups with varying formal and informal social power, promoting different agenda items. How should individuals and groups behave in these interactions? What is appropriate for one as a member of a democratic public, occupying a specific social position, to try to make salient for this public as an issue to be considered? In this paper I argue that there are distinct norms of agenda setting in democratic societies. Specifically, agenda setters should aim at providing the democratic public with an apt perspective on the important issues and challenges that lie ahead of them. I will further discuss how disparities in social power and reasonable disagreement on the importance of societal issues affects the norms of agenda setting.
(What) Do We Want Collective Attention To Be?
Eve Kitsik (University of Vienna)
I take a pragmatist approach to examining the nature of collective attention, and ask: should we think as if there was distinctly collective attention, and if so, then how should we think of it, more precisely? “Collective attention” talk is, on the one hand, a convenient and potentially fruitful way of discussing how collectives should prioritize issues, distribute what might be called collective attentional resources (like shared time, space, funding, and accessibility of information), and co-ordinate their shared understandings, in pursuit of collective goals. Like individuals, collectives should attend in a way that helps them achieve (what ought to be) their goals. On the other hand, I argue, framing these questions about organizing our lives together as a matter of shaping collective attention also has a downside. Namely, this way of thinking encourages us to take up the perspective of the collective and prioritize its goals (in particular, the goal of making long-term social progress), and the corresponding attentional needs, over those of individuals. This can lead to overriding the individuals’ wishes about how they are to be attended to (for example, whether they want heightened attention to their gender or race, or the injustice that has befallen them).
The Attention of Corporate Agents
Lars Moen (University of Vienna)
Certain groups are commonly regarded as corporate agents with a significant degree of autonomy from their individual members. These groups have decision-making procedures enabling them to produce beliefs and desires that differ from those of their individual members. This paper shows how also the attention of such collectives can come apart from that of the individuals constituting them. But crucially, this exploration will reveal that individuals still control the focus of corporate attention. And this demonstration of how a group cannot control its own attention will support the attribution of responsibility to individuals, rather than to a corporate agent, for the group’s actions.
Collective Forgetting
Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge)
It's not uncommon to describe forgetting as occurring at a social level - to talk of collective amnesia, or social forgetting, for instance. Is there a way of understanding this kind of idiom as anything more than either a metaphor, or a shorthand for what is happening at the individual level? In this talk I first of all disambiguate what it would take for forgetting to be truly (or interestingly) social. I then argue that if we understand forgetting in terms of a kind of anti-salience, we can make good sense of the concept of truly social forgetting. Finally, I defend against the concern that this is not a significant form of forgetting by arguing that it is a core form of forgetting at both the individual and social levels.
Activism as Engineering Collective Attention
Ninni Suni (University of Helsinki) and Simo Kyllönen (University of Helsinki)
We argue for a specific epistemic function of societal and political activism: its ability to engineer collective attention. Activism’s epistemic function is analysed in relation to the social structures and institutions that shape collective attention. We identify five levels of institutionalization of collective attention in terms of their power to influence individual attention: aggregate of individuals, semi-institutional, institutional, policy, and state institution. These vary in stability, time span, extent, and their ability to influence attention patterns.
Through various institutions and resources, collectives have the power to push something as salient to an individual. This creates power disparities between those with access to institutional power and those without. Activism can be seen as an attempt to challenge this by raising new issues into collective awareness and challenging systematic attention deficits. However, in doing so activists also face epistemic barriers such as hermeneutical injustice and critical defanging.
The Narrative Coordination of Collective Attention
Daniel Vespermann (University of Heidelberg)
A great deal of research in philosophy and developmental psychology has investigated joint attention, which usually takes place in the same space, simultaneously between at least two subjects, and requires that those who jointly focus their attention on something are mutually aware of it. However, for collective attention, that is, the shared attention of large groups or entire societies these conditions rarely, if ever, apply. Yet, if we want to maintain that both types of shared attention are cognate attentional phenomena, we need to explain how large groups are able to coordinate their attention when none of the three conditions (shared time, shared space, and mutual awareness) are met. I will call this the coordination problem for collective attention.
Starting from a minimally demanding and liberal understanding of what characterizes attention in general, I will argue that narrative organization of information can satisfy the three conditions of the coordination problem. In a next step, I will draw on empirical research on the role of narrative structures for scenario construction in mental time travel and on narrative transportation to show how the narrative organization of information binds attention by enabling a shared foreground-background structure. In a final step, I will consider some implications of this proposal for the ethics of collective attention.
Attentional Domination
Sebastian Watzl (University of Oslo)
Most discussions in the ethics of attention have focused on the evaluation of an individual's attention. Yet, an individual's attention is embedded in a rich social world. This, I argue, creates the potential for some individuals or groups to exercise social power over others: I argue for the existence and significance of Attentional Domination: when one person or group of people is in a position to effectively impose their will on the attention of others. They can do so by controlling their attentional environment – the aspects of the world that shape their Muntonian salience structures. The potential for attentional domination derives from a fundamental vulnerability: in order to do anything useful with our capacity for attention we need to rely on external influences on it. I argue that attention can be an effective domain for domination because of how it organizes an individual's life, how it affects decision making and choice, because of its central role in inquiry and information gathering, and how it shapes our subjectivity. Attentional Domination can take many forms. I discuss some of them and focus especially on one that is prominent today, namely effective control over others' sensory environments. Such control resembles, I argue, control over a city's transportation infrastructure. It controls to where someone is transported mentally.
Collective Distractions: Attention, Questions, and Ideology
Ege Yumusak (University of Pennsylvania)
Someone who believes that <The rich deserve to be rich, and the poor deserve to be poor> suffers from a particular epistemic ill—an ideology. An ideology is an epistemically defective worldview that is derived from or functions to further the practice interests of a particular sociopolitical group as part of a system of thought. In this conception of ideology, an ideological belief is the paradigm case of ideology, and the epistemic ill of ideology is a type of collective misinformation. Thinking of ideology as merely a species of misinformation, however, eclipses an important phenomenon: collective distraction. In this paper I argue for a particular account of collective distraction as an investment in ideological questions. In this account, a society that repeatedly puts the question “How will the government pay for a national healthcare plan?” up for public debate suffers from collective distraction because individuals in this society have ideological patterns of attention.