Collective Attention

Collective attention, in Citton's framework, is the large-scale coordination of a society's focus toward common objects—a national crisis, a cultural event, a shared question. It is joint attention scaled to the level of a polity: millions of individual attentional streams converging on the same phenomenon, creating the conditions for collective deliberation, cultural meaning-making, and coordinated response. Collective attention is not the sum of individual attention but an emergent property of the attentional ecology—it arises when the environment provides shared objects (broadcast events, public discourse, common texts), temporal synchronization (everyone attending at approximately the same time), and institutional coordination (media that convene rather than fragment focus). Collective attention is the substrate on which democracy operates: without it, deliberation fragments into isolated individual judgments, public discourse dissolves into algorithmic echo chambers, and the capacity for collective action—requiring shared diagnosis of shared problems—atrophies.