Attention is a scarce, precious asset, and attracting it is as costly as a real ‘civil war’ on a universal scale. It is the commodity that dictates the value of all other commodities, be they material or immaterial, real or symbolic. More sophisticated mechanisms have been created in efforts to attract attention and tactics have been invented to make us passive, anaesthetised hostages. An attention economy has thus become a powerful field in the general economy, boosted substantially by new technologies for which attention is absolute capital. The ability to attract attention and the idea of disputing and competing for it is the condition that governs not only the strict field of economics but also everything pertaining to political and cultural life. Today, attention itself is the object of attention and scrutiny. It is this highly topical matter that is addressed by the articles featured in this issue of Electra.

The subject of the dossier in this issue of Electra is a scarce and therefore highly controversial resource that has been the centre of an all-out competition war to manage to attract it. We are talking about attention, the faculty that is the subject of countless alarmist discourses assuring us that it is in crisis, that our brains are suffering the dangerous effects of new technologies and that there are clear signs that our mental processes are deteriorating.

Yves Citton, a leading author on the ecology and economy of attention, follows a path in this article that is not the usual lament about the scarcity of attention in the face of an overabundance of information. Moving towards curiosity and subjecting it to a political re-evaluation, Citton creates an alternative theoretical discourse that is no longer focused on the problems of the crisis and the scarcity of attention.

In this article, Italian philosopher Enrico Campo, author of a book dealing with the crisis of attention in the digital society, La testa altrove [Head Elsewhere], discusses the idea of attention as a resource in the process of degradation, finding arguments to challenge the commonplaces that we are on the verge of a cognitive apocalypse.

In this essay, Mark Wigley considers the place of architecture in the new economy of attention. With one eye on the historical past and the other on the technological future, he analyses both the discourses about and those produced by architecture, looking for continuities and discontinuities over time. He also questions what it means to pay attention to architecture. A professor at several universities, such as Princeton and Columbia in the USA, Wigley is an architect, historian, theorist and critic, and has curated several landmark exhibitions, such as at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example.

Georg Franck, the author of a pioneering book that has become a fundamental reference for reflections on the economy of attention, develops, in this article, his theses on the theoretical bases of this concept and on the specificity of the economic regime that characterises the economy of attention under the condition of the mass media.

The eminent British art historian and critic Claire Bishop, renowned as one of the leading theorists of the idea of participation in the visual arts and in performance, is about to launch a new book on the problem of attention in contemporary culture over the last thirty years. In conversation with Electra, this professor at City University of New York discusses exhibitions, installations, criticism and dance, exploring the radical ways in which digital technology has been transforming the idea of the spectator.

A contemporary of Fernando Pessoa, Konstantinos Cavafy is one of the greatest, most translated and most quoted poets of the 20th century. In his work, full of melancholic solemnity, desire and escape, pleasure and memory, gravity and lightness, beauty and poverty, biography and history, past and present meet and illuminate each other in poems that combine simplicity and rigour with ‘that ardent fervour of a Greek summer afternoon’, as his French translator Marguerite Yourcenar put it. From the obscurity of a routine and anonymous life, Cavafy extracted gold which was purer than the air over the Sea of Alexandria. Greek Nikos Pratsinis, who, together with poet Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, translated Cavafy’s work into Portuguese, portrays the poet and his poetry for Electra in eight key questions.

Born in Córdoba, María Sánchez is a writer and veterinarian. For her, these two professions are a combination full of interactions and surprises. From her diary we learn that her days are filled with searches and encounters. María talks about houses and travelling, books and animals, flowers and fruit, the sun and the rain, the body and writing, land and women, love and friendship. ‘Last night I had dinner with Sofia and Paola. We were all tired. We were talking about how the days race by, about the speed at which things happen and how our bodies have to keep up. The signs are appearing. We need to stop, to do nothing.’ And so we see, in this passage from the ‘Book of Hours’ entrusted to Electra, how time is what we make of it.

A reflection by Milan Kundera on the tragic history of Central Europe – this ‘Kidnapped West’ – is commented here by Christian Salmon, who was the Czech writer's assistant. Salmon is the author of Storytelling. La machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits [Storytelling. The storytelling and mind-formatting machine] and L'ère du Clash [The Clash Era] – to name but two of his books with wide international acclaim – and in 1993 founded the International Parliament of Writers.