2026학년도 1학기 1차 지필평가 (예상)

In D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt's "The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie," one of the most rhetorically powerful moments occurs when the authors describe how Norman Mackworth's wartime vigilance experiments — designed to save lives — eventually laid the intellectual groundwork for the contemporary attention economy. The passage notes that Mackworth's findings were ultimately appropriated by the casino industry and Big Tech. This moment develops the essay's central argument: that the exploitation of human attention is not a natural consequence of technology, but a historically traceable choice rooted in a reductive, mechanistic view of the human mind. The authors' use of historical irony is striking — military research aimed at protecting human life was repurposed to extract commercial profit. The syntax reinforces this shift: long subordinate clauses trace the slow drift from wartime necessity to peacetime exploitation, creating an accumulating sense of historical inevitability that deepens the reader's unease.

In "Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back.," the extended metaphor of "fracking" serves as the essay's rhetorical foundation. The authors describe the attention economy as "pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of... intimate stuff called attention." This metaphor develops the central theme that attention is a precious resource being violently extracted from unwilling subjects. The word choice of "fracking" — associated with environmental destruction and corporate recklessness — positions technology companies as extractive industries that leave human beings depleted. The imagery is visceral and industrial, deliberately contrasting with the abstract, cheerful language typically used to describe social media. This tonal contrast forces the reader to see digital engagement as something done to them, not for them.

The "attention economy" refers to a multi-trillion-dollar industrial system — currently estimated at $7 trillion — that treats human attention as a commodity: something that can be quantified, optimized, and sold to the highest bidder. The "lie" identified in the title is the premise underlying this entire system: that attention is a narrow, measurable, task-oriented capacity rather than a rich and complex dimension of human existence. This mechanistic model of attention has deep historical roots. Norman Mackworth, a British psychologist working during World War II, conducted experiments with a specially designed clock to study how long soldiers could maintain focus while monitoring radar equipment; from these experiments emerged the concept of the "vigilance decrement," and eventually an entire research tradition — vigilance studies — that quantified human attention in terms of efficiency and error rates. That same quantitative framework was then appropriated first by casinos (which used it to design addictive slot machines) and later by Big Tech corporations, which now deploy AI-driven feeds to maximize "engagement" — a euphemism for the extraction of quantified attention. Against this, the authors propose a richer vision of "true attention," drawing on the French philosopher Simone Weil, who described authentic attention as rooted in "love, care and commitment" — something that "cannot be sold or stolen." Because true attention is relational, ethical, and fundamentally unmeasurable, it defies the logic of a market that demands quantification. I find the authors' argument largely persuasive: the historical arc they trace from wartime psychology to the attention economy is meticulous and surprising, and the contrast between Weil's vision and the Mackworth-Broadbent model illuminates a genuine tension in how modern technology relates to human consciousness. However, I wish the authors had engaged more directly with the practical difficulty of translating their philosophical alternative into scalable action.