Attention as Practice

Attention as Practice: Buddhist Ethics Responses to Persuasive Technologies

Bombaerts, Gunter (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Anderson, Joel (Universiteit Utrecht)
Dennis, Matthew James (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Gerola, Alessio (Wageningen University & Research)
Frank, Lily (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Hannes, Tom (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Hopster, Jeroen (University of Twente)
Marin, L. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)
Spahn, Andreas (Eindhoven University of Technology)

2023

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry’s business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user’s autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control. While this push back is important, current societal debates on the ethics of persuasive technologies are informed by a particular understanding of attention, rarely posited explicitly yet assumed as the default. They share the same concept of attention, namely an individualistic and descriptive concept of attention that is a cognitive process, an expendable resource, something that one should control individually. We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, turning to Buddhist ethics to formulate a critique of persuasive technology from a genuinely ethical perspective. Buddhist ethics points at our attention’s inescapable ethical and ontological embeddedness. Attention as practice requires “the right effort” to distinguish desirable and undesirable states, the “right concentration” to stop the flow we are caught in, and the “right mindfulness” to fortify the ability to attend to the present situation and keep in mind a general sense of life’s direction. We offer input for further philosophical inquiry on attention as practice and attention ecology. We put forward comfort/effort and individualism/collectivism as two remaining central tensions in need of further research.

Attention economy
Attention ecology
Buddhism
Attention
Practice
Persuasive technology

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6092cd16-7180-481f-b834-ba513c44e198

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-023-09680-4

2948-1538

Global Philosophy, 33 (2)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 Gunter Bombaerts, Joel Anderson, Matthew James Dennis, Alessio Gerola, Lily Frank, Tom Hannes, Jeroen Hopster, L. Marin, Andreas Spahn