(What) do we want collective attention to be?

Abstract This paper takes a broadly pragmatist, rather than metaphysical, approach to collective attention. So, I ask not whether collective attention really exists and what it is, but whether and how we should ascribe attention to collectives. Focusing on the attribution of attention to whole societies, I argue that certain collective-level phenomena are analogous to aspects of individual attention: selection for action, the structuring of consciousness into foreground and background, and the allocation of cognitive resources to a task. We can therefore improve our understanding of the relevant collective-level phenomena by thinking of them as aspects of the collective’s attention. On the other hand, we should refrain from becoming uncritically immersed in the analogy. In particular, we should resist the idea of “society” as an extremely important agent whose attention should be organized so as to best pursue its legitimate goals, even when this conflicts with the interests of its individual human constituents.