"During the Enlightenment, close attention emerged as a virtue essential to knowledge and disciplined investigation, as demonstrated in 1740, when the naturalist Charles Bonnet..."

"... conducted a vigil of 21 days, daybreak to nearly midnight, to study the life cycle of a single aphid. At the dawn of the 20th century, the American philosopher William James insisted that voluntary human attention was the linchpin of free will. By that time, some laboratory researchers had begun to turn their attention to attention as a subject of explicit scientific inquiry. One of the first to undertake such investigations was James McKeen Cattell, a German-trained American at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Cattell, the first professor of psychology in the United States, used a fast-snap shutter to flash a few letters for a tiny fraction of a second. The test subjects then repeated back to him as many letters as they could remember. Observing a range of results, Dr. Cattell concluded that they reflected a significant feature of cognitive ability: what he called the 'span' of attention. Subsequent researchers used the attention span metric to identify children’s mental 'deficiency.'"

Write D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, in "The Century-Old Lie at the Heart of the Attention Economy" (NYT).

Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt have a book, "Attensity!" (commission earned). The word "attensity" appears in the column like this:

"Defeating the forces that frack human beings in order to extract the financial value of their attention is going to require... attention activism... a new politics of 'attensity.'"