2024/10/22 by Gunter Bombaerts, Tom Hannes, Bombaerts, Gunter +101
Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Educational and Social Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.17421
openalex publication_date 2024/10/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As the signatories of this manifesto, we denounce the attention economy as inhumane and a threat to our sociopolitical and ecological well-being. We endorse policymakers' efforts to address the negative consequences of the attention economy's technology, but add that these approaches are often limited in their criticism of the systemic context of human attention. Starting from Buddhist philosophy, we advocate a broader approach: an ecology of attending, that centers on conceptualizing, designing, and using attention (1) in an embedded way and (2) focused on the alleviating of suffering. With 'embedded' we mean that attention is not a neutral, isolated mechanism but a meaning-engendering part of an 'ecology' of bodily, sociotechnical and moral frameworks. With 'focused on the alleviation of suffering' we explicitly move away from the (often implicit) conception of attention as a tool for gratifying desires.