Seeking Attention: Economies, Modes, Ecologies

ABSTRACT Concerns about attention in the current era call for geographic approaches that contend with attention's important place in socio‐spatial life. To this end, this paper first notes that ‘economies’ have emerged as the most prevalent frame for geographic analyses of attention to date but warns that the dominance of such frameworks might close down other approaches. Second, it argues that discourses surrounding attention are often marked by a normative and moralising understanding of what attention is. To surmount this, it proposes appreciating attention's many modes, which allows us to understand new and emerging modes of attention—attention that is disordered, distributed, distracted—outside of moralising judgements that would see them as somehow deficient or inferior types of attention. Third, it suggests conceptualising attention ‘ecologies’ to better understand attention in relational and environmental terms. To think attention ecologically is to understand attention as a capacity that emerges in the relation between the neurobiological processes of the body and the set of multi‐scalar and intersecting social, material and technological environments in which it is situated. The argument is therefore that attention is inseparable from the environments we inhabit and so is not a strictly human capacity. The paper concludes with some critical reflections on the idea that we might ‘reclaim’ our attention, proposing instead a perspective that attention might be ‘re‐made’.