Radical Attention — Book Review

There is a strange historical irony to reading Julia Bell’s Radical Attention in 2026. When the book was first published in 2020, its account of the attention economy still carried something of a warning: digital platforms had discovered that human attention could be captured, quantified, and converted into profit. Six years on, very little of this requires explanation. It is difficult to imagine a more thoroughly contemporary and pertinent anxiety than the fear that we are no longer capable of paying attention.

The complaint is so pervasive that it’s become familiar background noise: our phones are distracting us, social media is shortening our attention spans, and algorithms are monitoring and determining our movements. Radical Attention, now reissued by Peninsula Press, enters the conversation with a more ambitious claim about what attention means and what is at stake in its capture. A short but striking critical piece on the attention economy, now with a foreword by Grace Blakeley and an afterword by the author, Radical Attention arrives into a media environment that has not merely intensified the conditions it describes, but melded them into what is considered ordinary experience. The question about whether our attention is being competed for appears much more banal currently; more interestingly, Bell is concerned about what it means to attend to anything at all when attention itself has become one of the primary forms through which contemporary life is organised.

For Bell, attention is not simply the capacity to concentrate. It is a way of determining what matters; attending to something is to give it time, and giving something time is to allow it a certain significance within the finite span of one’s life. So, the attention economy is far more than an irritating feature of digital culture; the competition for our attention becomes a competition over what we notice, what we value, and what we give our care to. Moving between the structural and the personal in her essay, Bell connects the economic mechanisms of digital platforms with the much smaller, more intimate experiences of trying to read, think, listen, or stay still. Her registry spanning such scales is what is particularly moving about this book, whereby larger, impersonal economic and technological forces are made personal at the apparently private level of consciousness and distraction.

Most remarkably, Bell delivers her essay in these short-form aphoristic chunks, seemingly adherent to the very quick-lived bursts of attention she condemns. Her offering is refreshingly ironic, such that the form of the book about sustained attention demands relatively little sustained attention from the reader. Bell’s short sections move quickly and without notice between fact-delivery on technology, musings on capitalism, literature and politics, cultural criticism, personal anecdote, and anonymous online happenings. These fragments accumulate rather than produce a single sustained line of argument, and the effect is both compelling and frustratingly addictive. The interruption of thought, the take-over of alternative associations, and subjects opening up into one another render the book difficult to hold in the mind as a continuous object. As a whole, then, the essay’s poignancy exceeds its individual observations, challenging contemporary consciousness while itself somewhat being a representation of the fragmented and distracted reader.

“Soft is the new hard”, argues Bell in her afterword; amidst the rapidity and force of capitalism and technological dominance, sustained attention is the softer discipline, the only practice which can teach us “how to feel our thoughts and think our feelings”. Recently, it seems that there is this temptation to imagine the attentive subject as someone who simply withdraws: the reader alone with a novel, the walker without headphones, the concert-goer with no recording device, and so on. Bell offers something more sophisticated than this image, and her political concerns prevent Radical Attention from slipping into a straightforward manifesto for digital detox. Her standpoint is that attention itself can be a form of resistance: less prescriptive of some kind of radical digital abstinence, and more interested instead in making us conscious of the value of the time and care we so continually give away.

For all the familiarity of the subject, Radical Attention thus retains a compelling urgency. The book asks us to notice the mechanics of our own attention, and in doing so makes something habitually insignificant (namely, where we look, what we linger over, and what we allow to interrupt us) feel newly consequential. If attention is one of the fundamental ways we participate in the world, then deciding where to place it is also, in however small a way, deciding what kind of world we are willing to inhabit. Radical Attention is ultimately hopeful in its simple insistence that we can be autonomous over our own attention. Put the phone down, and get the book.

“Terrifying, clarifying and ultimately hopeful, this is an essential book. Julia Bell grapples with the grim
realities of our online lives, setting out possibilities for resisting and reclaiming our imperilled freedoms.”
— Olivia Laing