CONCEPT
Attentional Eutrophication
The choking of the attentional commons by overabundance of content—surface bloom, deep suffocation, the ecological death that looks like life.
Attentional eutrophication is Citton's ecological metaphor for what happens when the volume of content competing for collective attention exceeds the commons' processing capacity. In limnology, eutrophication occurs when excess nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus) cause explosive algae growth—the surface blooms green, blocking sunlight, killing underwater plants, depleting oxygen, suffocating fish. The lake looks more alive than ever from above while dying from below. Citton applies the process to the informational commons: AI-generated content is the nutrient overload, the flood of articles/images/videos that exceeds any community's capacity for collective digestion. The surface of the attentional commons becomes hyperactive—more posts, more engagement, more visible activity. The depths suffocate—deep attention starved of oxygen (time, quiet, sustained focus), collective attention unable to converge because the volume overwhelms shared processing. The commons dies while appearing more productive than ever. The bloom is mistaken for health.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The eutrophication metaphor captures something that economic analyses of the attention economy miss: the pathology is not scarcity but excess. The Malthusian framing—too little attention for