Social Semiotics

ISSN: 1035-0330 (Print) 1470-1219 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20

Metaphor and social action: how worker attention

is translated into capital

Ian Roderick

To cite this article: Ian Roderick (2017): Metaphor and social action: how worker attention is
translated into capital, Social Semiotics, DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2017.1406578

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1406578

Published online: 21 Nov 2017.

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 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1406578

Metaphor and social action: how worker attention is

translated into capital
Ian Roderick
Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Using the example of attention, this paper argues that there is a Conceptual metaphor;
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tendency to treat conceptual metaphors as representational information society; cognitive

resources at the expense of critically examining how they are capitalism; attention
economy
implicated in the material structuring of social action. Rather than
understanding metaphor in terms of transference, it is proposed
that the concept of translation be applied to how we theorise the
workings of metaphor. By translating rather than merely
transferring concepts from one domain to another, metaphors
function as semiotic materialisations that give structure to social
action. It is through metaphor that human attentional processes
are made to be translated into the material practices of
knowledge work under cognitive capitalism. However, for
attention to be translated from cognitive process into labour more
than a simple associative process must take place. The attention-
as-labour metaphor does not just transform how we think about
work, it lends itself to transforming how work is performed and
managed. In this way, as discursive resources metaphors
participate in the constitution not only of our understanding of
social realities but also how we build and act within those
realities. Thus, metaphors are not just evidence of asymmetries in
power relations but also function as instruments of those
asymmetries.

Introduction
The development of the so-called information society is said to have spurred on profound
structural changes to labour. Work and the generation of wealth is said to be increasingly
information or knowledge-based. Of course, the belief that we are witness to the emer-
gence of a new information society is, as Mattelart (2006, 1) contends, “the result of a geo-
political construction” that obscures the global distribution of labour and privileges those
“northern” economies that are supposedly knowledge-based. In other words, the notion of
an information society represents not so much a situation in which society and capitalism
have become more informational but rather a discursive privileging of knowledge and
creative industries within transnational, neoliberal accounts of capital accumulation.
Nevertheless, the notion of a new knowledge-based economy is a pernicious one that
has real material consequences for how work is to be organised and managed.

CONTACT Ian Roderick iroderick@wlu.ca

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 I. RODERICK

In support of this faith in the rise of knowledge and creative industries over traditional
manufacturing, economic activity is increasingly likened to cognition. Indeed, the very
concept of knowledge-work connotes associations of thinking with labour. As such, the
notion that the dominant form of work is changing from physical to intellectual labour
invites greater interest in and, ultimately, a need to manage the mental lives of workers.
One aspect of worker cognition that has come under particular scrutiny is that of attention
since that is understood as how we prioritise and manage information. Not surprisingly
then, the metaphor of attention-as-labour comes to be central to how work is being rede-
fined as information or knowledge-based. Accordingly, this paper offers a critical examin-
ation of the attention-as-labour metaphor and does so in part to address what I perceive as
a tendency to inadvertently treat metaphor as primarily a representational resource at the
expense of its materiality.
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To support my position, I explore how the metaphor of attention-as-labour is realised in

the Human Factors and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) literature1 that promotes the
development of Attention Aware Systems (AAS). AAS are computational systems designed
to be able to adapt to as well as support human attentional processes. The development of
AAS is being implemented through the design of intelligent notifications, multitasking and
task resumption support tools, and awareness mechanisms for collaborative attention allo-
cation. As such, these systems are said to “partner” with the user, providing information in
accordance with her current attentional state. For advocates such as Claudia Roda (2010,
354), the development of AAS “promises to address many of the problems related to infor-
mation overload, cyber collaboration, and mobility, by providing features helping users in
coping with attentional limitations.” As HCI research increasingly focuses upon the ability
and limitations of human users to attend to the volume and range of information that
computational systems can potentially present, AAS are proposed to mitigate the issues
of user overload and interruption. In this way, AAS are being engineered to not only facili-
tate but also capture and refine human attentional processes.
In what follows, I propose to trace through how discourse strands (Jäger and Maier
2015) about attention are not simply transferred but translated from one domain to
another through metaphor. Specifically, I am interested in the way in which attention is
taken up from cognitive science and reformulated in the disciplines of computer
science, ergonomics, and cognitive psychology as a discursive object central to the
accumulation of value within cognitive capitalism. Simply put, attention, as a cognitive
process, (re)emerges as a problem to be technically resolved as capitalism itself is recon-
stituted as a largely cognitive set of activities.

Metaphor as translation
Metaphor is characterised by Aristotle (1932) as “the application of a strange term either
transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to
the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy.” Accordingly, Van Leeuwen
(2005, 30) proposes, the “essence of metaphor is the idea of ‘transference’.” Typically
understood as a figure of speech, a figurative metaphor establishes a meaningful associ-
ation between things based upon a claim of semblance whereby one thing is character-
ised as closely resembling another in some specific way. As such, metaphors afford
ways of communicating information about some unfamiliar thing or phenomena based
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 3

upon connecting it to already established experience of a familiar thing or phenomena

and the connection is established through the metaphoric process of transference.
Metaphor works, therefore, by transferring the experience of one shared phenomena to
another less familiar one and, in doing so, they also bring that less familiar experience into
the discursive. Metaphors are thus generative in that they provide frameworks for under-
standing by transferring a concept from one domain to another. It is this generative aspect
of metaphor that opens the way for Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 4) to propose that meta-
phors are in fact more than figurative or poetic language, and rather than being simply
“a matter of words,” they are in fact conceptually “pervasive in everyday life” and therefore
integral to thought and action. In this way, Lakoff (1979, 210) forcefully argues that meta-
phor be instead understood as “a mode of thought.” Indeed, our ability to understand and
extrapolate depends to a large extent on being able to think about unfamiliar things in
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relation to other familiar things. To do this we routinely call upon conceptual metaphors.
This is what Gibbs (2017) has referred to as the “metaphor in thought” thesis.
Following from Lakoff and Johnson (1980), a conceptual metaphor is the product of a
transfer from source domain (the concept from which the metaphorical expression is to be
transferred) to the target domain (the concept from which the metaphorical expression is
to be applied) creating a new metaphor for conceptualising and experiencing a given
phenomenon. Metaphors, in effect, transfer a quality or attribute of a thing or action
made salient from one (source) domain over to a different thing or action in another
(target) domain. Accordingly, as a semiotic resource, metaphor is of special interest in criti-
cal discourse studies since, ideologically, it “may be exploited in discourse to promote one
particular image of reality over another” (Hart 2014, 137). However, I intend to argue that,
from a multimodal perspective, this particular understanding of metaphor, as principally a
mode of thought, is potentially limiting since it still leaves us with an essentially “mentalist”
(Latour 1986), even if inter-subjective, conception of the term. This is a problem for multi-
modal critical discourse analysis because it inadvertently privileges thought over action
and does not differ all that greatly from a Lippmannesque (Lippmann 1922) account of
stereotypes. As van der Weele and Boomen (2008, 2) note: “While the Lakovian paradigm
claims that metaphors frame thought, language, and action, the action part seems to be
relatively under-explored and under-theorized.” Accordingly, rather than treating meta-
phors as a means of conveying images of reality, I propose instead to conceptualise
them as semiotic materialisations (cf. Machin 2016, 330) that give structure to social action.
Etymologically, as Van Leeuwen (2005, 30) observes, metaphor itself, is in fact, a meta-
phor: it presupposes “a similarity between transporting goods between places and trans-
porting words between meanings.” This association with traffic in words and things is
important since it brings us closer to a more material and ultimately, multimodal, under-
standing of metaphor (see Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009). However, when metaphor is
theorised only in terms of transfer, there is a risk of lapsing back into the conduit metaphor
as detailed by Reddy (1979) despite Lakoff’s own rejection of the metaphor. As transfer
alone, metaphor becomes a relatively reliable means of carrying an associated idea
from one domain to another. Furthermore, it follows that the relation between the
source and target domains is understood as a binary in which one domain ends up stand-
ing as proxy for another. However, in the case of the attention-as-labour metaphor, it does
not suffice to simply argue that it affords representing attention as if it were labour – in
point of fact, the metaphor is essential to the financialisation of attention by transforming
 4 I. RODERICK

it into labour. Metaphors are therefore more than binary associative connections between
domains. They entail a process of transformation in which a salient phenomenon or
experience in one domain becomes resemiotized (Iedema 2001) within another. So,
rather than treating metaphors figuratively, as mental pictures of what is shared
between source and target, it is better to understand them as being transformational as
well as representational.
As Guldin (2012, 41) proposes, metaphors are triadic in structure since “they distinguish
between a point of departure, a point of arrival and a space in between that has to be
crossed in order to complete the process.” In this way, a metaphor establishes a relation-
ship based upon an association between the two domains and does so by effecting a par-
ticular way of interpreting and experiencing the target domain. This is accomplished by
means of a crossing “a space in-between” the two domains but, for the crossing to
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happen, a process of transformation as well as transportation (association) needs to

occur. This is the action aspect of metaphor that van der Weele and Boomen (2008, 2)
argue has been underdeveloped in Lakovian conceptual metaphor theory. Attention-as-
labour does not simply transform how we think about work, it lends itself to transforming
how work is performed and managed. Furthermore, in the process of transformation, both
target and source domains are both adjusted to one another so that each is now compre-
hended in relation to the other. Again, in this example, attention is made to become labour
and labour is made to become attentive. Bryant (2009) terms this, Latour’s Principle: “There
is no transportation without translation.”
Latour uses the metaphor of transportation or, as he terms it, mobilisation, to describe
how scientific knowledge is established and made durable. As Latour (1986, 26) explains it,
If you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go
out their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. You have to go and to come
back with the “things” if your moves are not to be wasted. But the “things” have to be able to
withstand the return trip without withering away.

The “things” to be transferred, brought back, are made durable or “immutable” through
their transformation or translation into mobile forms. So, for the crossing to happen
from one domain to another, the concept to be transferred must undergo a “translation”
so as to be viable and withstand the journey. For example, Latour (1986, 22) characterises
laboratory practice as “the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper.” Translation is
never simply a neutral process of transferring meaning from one domain into another,
since:
Translation does not mean a shift from one vocabulary to another, from one French word to
one English word, for instance, as if the two languages existed independently. Like Michel
Serres, I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a
link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents.
(Latour 1994, 32)

Although Latour’s obvious immediate concern is with the collection and collocation of
observations and evidences of the material world into immutable fact, his work also
lends itself to a more nuanced understanding of the triadic relationship between source
and target domains.
Again, since metaphor establishes a relation between source and target domains, it
stands to reason that the source and target domains cannot be assumed to be
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 5

independent of one another. Applying the translation metaphor to conceptual metaphor,

therefore affords the opportunity to consider how the relation generated between source
and target domains also entails their transformation. As suggested above, in order to make
the transfer to the target domain, some element of the source domain must first be made
salient. Instead of imagining a concept to pass smoothly from one domain to another,
metaphor is accomplished through the creation of a conceptual relation involving the
modification and adjustment of the two domains to one another. So, while metaphor is
often understood as figurative transportation, Latour’s account of translation highlights
how metaphors not only have symbolic significance by representing a particular image
of reality but equally how they are realised in modes other than language and have
actual material consequences by shaping social practices.
In some ways, the emphasis upon translation may seem analogous to what Faucon-
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nier and Turner (2002, 37) term conceptual integration or blending whereby correspon-
dences between concepts are imaginatively constructed through a “general, basic
mental operation with highly elaborate dynamic principles and governing constraints.”
Hart (2014, 138) contrasts conceptual blends to conceptual metaphors noting that the
former “are ad hoc structures built during discourse for purposes of local understand-
ing” whilst the latter pertain to “conceptual organization.” Blends are thus described by
Hart (2014, 138) as “a projection of conceptual structure from two (or more) mental
spaces into a third blended space giving rise to new emergent structure.” This triadic
form does have the benefit of offering an account of conceptualisation as more
dynamic and hybridised but only in terms of a dialectical relationship between con-
cepts. At work here is an unacknowledged fundamental hylomorphism in which the
process of conceptualisation is one in which ideas come to take form and are
expressed through the materiality of semiotic modes. Conversely, the translation of con-
ceptualisations entails the “transposition of ephemeral content-expression (meaning-
materiality) complexes into more durable context-expression (meaning-materiality)
complexes (and vice versa)” (Iedema 2001, 37). By overlooking the space in-between
and the requirement to translate, we still do not break from the original notion of
metaphor as transference.
Studying metaphors as multimodal semiotic resources, does not mean examining how
linguistic metaphors are in turn realised using other semiotic modes. Interestingly, Gibbs
(2017, 15) does suggest that the process of metaphor generation might be understood as
being overdetermined such that metaphors are “emergent products of multiple, nested
factors (i.e., biological, historical, cultural, social, cognitive, and linguistic), and may interact
with many knowledge sources and experiences to create context-sensitive, task-specific
metaphorical behaviours.” While this strikes me as very promising, so long as thought is
presumed to precede action, that social action is an extension of cognition, the
problem remains that metaphors are still understood as principally residing in our
heads. Following from Bourdieu (1990, 76), I prefer to think of metaphor as residing prin-
cipally in neither the mind nor in language:
The world of objects, a kind of book in which each thing speaks metaphorically of all others
and from which children learn to read the world, is read with the whole body, in and through
the movements and displacements which define the space of objects as much as they are
defined by it.
 6 I. RODERICK

Metaphors do more than construct mental frameworks for representing reality since they
are never purely mental constructs. As translations, metaphors (re)structure thought but
equally they are integral to materialising the very realities in which embodied actors act.

Attention as cognitive process

Attention is generally understood as both a mental state and a set of processes. On the
one hand, it is used to refer to a focussed state of awareness of a set of stimuli. On the
other, it also entails the cognitive processes entailed in selecting some environmental
stimuli whilst ignoring or overlooking others. Drawn from Shannon’s (1948) mathematical
model of communication and cybernetic theories of information systems, theories of
attention conceptualise the nervous system as a communication system, functioning “as
a single channel … limited in the rate at which information could be transmitted”
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(Styles 2006, 13) (see e.g. Broadbent 1958). As proposed by Nabeth, Roda, and Angehrn
(2006, 6),
Human beings have developed a complex set of attentional processes, allowing such allo-
cation of cognitive resources. Most studies in cognitive psychology model such processes
as being responsible for, enabling, and guiding the selection of incoming perceptual
information.

This process of selection necessary for attention is accomplished by the implementation of

both perceptual and cognitive processes that in turn allow us to become aware of the
selected stimuli. Attention, however, is not simply a reactive response to sensory stimu-
lation since to attend to information we must also do something with it. For example,
Chun and Wolfe (2001, 273) understand the process of attention as doing double duty:
First, attention can be used to select behaviourally relevant information and/or to ignore the
irrelevant or interfering information … Second, attention can modulate or enhance this
selected information according to the state and goals of the perceiver.

In this way, according to the authors, by attending to stimuli, we do not simply internalise
external environmental inputs as they come to us but instead, we actively seek and
process that information to meaningfully engage in our environment.
What we actually attend to in our environment is said to be accomplished by two
orienting or controlling mechanisms. First, there is the voluntary, goal-driven mechanism
referred to as endogenous control. An example of this sort of attention would be closely
reading a book or watching a video of a car driving down a quiet country road rather. Sec-
ondly, there is the involuntary stimulus-driven mechanism referred to as exogenous
control. So, for example, if the car in the video were to be obscured behind a group of
trees and, while watching the road on the other side of the trees for the car to reappear,
a zombie suddenly pops up screaming in the foreground causing the viewer to startle, this
would be an example of exogenous attention. The degree to which an external stimulus
can bring about an involuntary shift in attention will, of course, vary with the saliency of
the actual stimuli and the degree of focus held by the subject. For Chun and Wolfe
(2001, 280), this is not a simple binary theory of attention since it is the interaction of
these two mechanisms that determines its guidance. Thus, attention can be understood
as the product of an interaction between attending to selected information and attending
to new outside information that may or may not result in a shift in the focus of attention.
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 7

Accordingly, Roda and Thomas (2006, 560) propose that there are three commonly recog-
nised fundamental facets of attention: “selection, awareness, and control.”
While there are a number of competing theories of attention in circulation within con-
temporary cognitive science, it is the load theory (and its various permutations) of atten-
tion that has come to be the most influential within workplace and HCI research. At the risk
of over-simplification, the load theory of attention draws upon a machine metaphor and
contends that attention is not only selective but also finite in capacity (see Posner 1982).
The metaphor often used for limited attentional capacity is that of a spotlight such that we
are in fact only able to bring into focus a limited amount of information that falls within the
parameters of selection. More recently, a more dynamic “zoom-lens” metaphor has been
adopted in which the attentional field can expand but at the expense of speed of infor-
mation processing (e.g. Castiello and Umiltà 1990). Attention, then, is understood as the
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outcome of a set of processes that select and focus inbound perceptual stimuli thus limit-
ing the amount of information that must be processed and potential cognitive overload. In
this way, attention is constituted as both a disposition or resource to be called upon (an
attuned mental state) and an activity (the function of selecting and filtering information).
Furthermore, it is worth noting that the use of optical metaphors clearly privileges the
visual as the prototypic form for cognitive processes – seeing is information processing
might be the new idiom. This is evident when Harris and Jenkins (2001, 4) consider the
act of reading to propose that
[m]ost of the potentially smothering information arriving at the retina is lost by the limited
resolving power of the retina outside the central few degrees of the fovea. But even with
this blessed filter, there remains an enormous amount of information that could, theoretically,
be extracted.

Finally, since the human capacity to process information is limited, attention itself is there-
fore conceived of as a limited or scarce cognitive resource, especially in comparison to the
evident abundance of information made available in the perceptual environment.
This notion of attention as scarce, leads to a conception of attention in which it is not
only vulnerable to distraction but can introduce errors in perception and performance: “we
may ‘see’ only the relevant aspects of a scene, or we may completely misperceive certain
events, or how certain configurations of external stimuli may help or hinder task perform-
ance” (Nabeth, Roda, and Angehrn 2006, 6). Furthermore, it draws upon the “informa-
tional” conception of perception, which is made quite explicit when Smith, Ratcliff, and
Wolfgang (2004, 1297–1298) describe their understanding of the selection process as
being analogous to signal detection theory:
As in signal detection theory, raw noise may be inherent in the stimulus itself, or may reflect
processes that are internal to the observer. To make a decision about the presence or identity
of a stimulus, successive samples of the noisy stimulus trace are accumulated until a criterion
amount of information needed for a response is obtained.

Attention then entails the selection and awareness of “good” information over “bad” noise
much like the signal-to-noise ratio of Shannon (1948) employs. And because attention is
limited insofar as individuals can only attend to so much, it becomes something that
needs to be managed, if it is to operate effectively. So, for example, Pylyshyn (2006,
162) writes that
 8 I. RODERICK

Limited-capacity information processing implies that a decision has to be made about where
(or to what elements, properties, or more generally, “channels”) to allocate the limited
capacity. How and on what basis is this decision made?

Thus, the notion that attention entails a decision-making process also opens the possi-
bility of being able to guide or manage that decision-making process. Since attention
is subject to both exogenous and endogenous control, it introduces the possibility of
not only influencing attention performance through external control but “enhancing”
or “augmenting” it.

Cognitive capitalism and the problem of attention

The problem of attention in the workplace is, of course, not new. Hugo Münsterberg (1913,
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206), for example, makes a clear comparison between the operations of machinery
(capital) and worker attention (labour process) in the name of scientific management
and efficiency:
In industrial establishments in which the smallest disturbance in the machine is at once reme-
died by a mechanic in order that the greatest possible economic effect may be secured, fre-
quently nobody takes any interest in the most destructive disturbances which unnecessarily
occur in the subtlest part of the factory mechanism, namely, the attention apparatus of the
laborers.

Not only is productivity of output to be secured by the managing of “the attention

apparatus of the laborers” with the same rigour as that applied to the operations of
the workshop machinery, but Münsterberg explicitly subsumes the cognitive capacities
of the factory workers within the broader “factory mechanism.” Of course, what con-
cerns Münsterberg is the efficiency of the material labour process and the conse-
quences for factory productivity should worker attention to be undermined. In
cognitive capitalism, however, attention is not simply to be shielded from distraction;
instead it becomes a problem that must be actively managed. In this way, attention
might not be a new problem but the way in which it comes to be problematised is
distinctly different – what, to borrow from Foucault, might be called a “problematic
of management” (Foucault 1991).
The cognitive capitalism thesis presupposes that we are undergoing a fundamental
“exit from the industrial capitalism that originated in the big Manchester factory, which
was dependent primarily on the physical labour of manual workers processing raw
materials” (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 48) and transitioning instead to a system of producing
value that “is founded on the accumulation of immaterial capital, the dissemination of
knowledge and the driving role of the knowledge economy” (50). Accordingly, within
this new mode of accumulation, the work environments and the kinds of work being per-
formed is said to have profoundly changed from Fordist systems of production in which
labour and production are organised as a series of clearly delineated tasks. Instead,
work processes in cognitive capitalism are said to be characterised by overlap, simultane-
ity, and heterogeneity. This can be seen in the old economy/new knowledge-based
economy binary employed by Nabeth, Roda, and Angehrn (2006, 1):
The advent of the knowledge-based economy has radically transformed the nature of work
and business in organizations. Employees, who once used to fulfill only relatively routine
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 9

tasks in stable environments, have now transformed into autonomous knowledge workers
who are engaged into rich, diverse, changing and creative activities in which the processing
of information is the central part of their work. Old economy’s companies, which used to
operate in a relatively stable situations centered on the production of large quantities of a rela-
tively small variety of goods, have now mutated into learning organizations.

Beyond the obvious quixotic treatment of the creation of precarious and hyper-exploitable
forms of employment under neoliberal regimes, it is worth noting that this de-routinisa-
tion of work makes the boundaries between tasks and their completion all the more ill-
defined and fragmented both temporally and spatially.
As a result, work processes in the “knowledge-based economy” are constituted as being
qualitatively different from more linear Taylorized and Fordist forms of industrial pro-
duction, with knowledge workers instead “spending short amounts of time in tasks and
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switching frequently” (Mark, Gonzalez and Harris 2005, 321). This increasing complexity
of work means that primary work tasks are often comprised of multiple subtasks with
other lower priority tasks kept in suspension on the periphery (Quinones et al. 2008,
177). Furthermore, not only is the idealised new economy worker expected to be
engaged in multi rather than serial-task labour, but also to perform these tasks in colla-
borative and increasingly itinerant workspaces as many companies elect to adopt flexible
workplace strategies such as hoteling and virtual officing (see Roda and Nabeth 2008, 214).
Because the temporal and spatial boundaries or breakpoints in tasks are increasingly unli-
kely to be points of task completion, added “cognitive work” in the form of attention is
required of knowledge workers to ensure the continuity of the work process:
The problem faced most often by knowledge workers is not related anymore to the scarce
access to knowledge, but rather to the choice they have to make in the allocation of their
limited cognitive abilities to a wide variety of knowledge sources. Management of attention
has thus become the issue that needs to be addressed. (Roda and Nabeth 2008, 214)

Accordingly, worker attention comes to be an explicitly identified target of management

since “new economy” knowledge workers are expected to perform numerous attentional
shifts corresponding with the frequent switching between tasks. In other words, while for
Münsterberg the problem was to keep workers on task, now the issue is how to manage
workers across multiple tasks.
Such preoccupations with employee focus and productivity have led to a microanaly-
tics of attention within the fields of ergonomics, human factors, management, computer
science, information studies and so on. So, for example, in their study of the task patterns
of knowledge workers, Mark, Gonzalez, and Harris (2005, 325) find that fragmentation and
interruption are quintessential features of “knowledge work”:
fragmentation of work is a way of life for these information workers. The majority of working
spheres are interrupted and people spend about 11 minutes in a working sphere before
switching to another. The irony of the work day is that the longer people spend in a
working sphere, (and thus we assume become more involved in it) the more likely it is to
be interrupted and the longer is the interrupting event.

Interestingly, Bailey and Konstan (2006, 686) apply an epidemiological metaphor to

describe the rapid growth in volume of computer-mediated interruptions: “E-mail notifica-
tions, instant messages, and agent-initiated interactions are all contributing to a burgeon-
ing epidemic of interruption … ” The threat of interruptions to worker productivity is also
 10 I. RODERICK

established by Czerwinski, Cutrell, and Horwitz (2000) who observe that the amount of
time expended upon a distraction before returning to the original task actually increased
when the interruption was irrelevant to the task at hand. What such research into work-
place interruption all points to is a calculation of the organisational costs, in terms of
time and productivity, of “poorly managed” worker attentional shifts.
The upshot is that in this supposed new mode of capitalism, the extraction of surplus
value is not to be derived from the physical labour of workers but by their cognitive labour.
This “cognitization” of the labour process, I argue, is accomplished semiotically, in part, by
the use of metaphors that translate work into a largely mental activity in which the
materials and processes of labour become de-materialised as information and cognition.
Accordingly, work flows become largely refigured as lines of communication while the
minds of workers become nodes in the networked system of production. It is through
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metaphor therefore that attention as a cognitive process comes to be translated into a

financial activity (labour), an organisational resource (capital), and, ultimately, something
to be micro-managed on-the-fly.

Attention as labour process

Since attention is understood as the sustained effort of selecting and processing infor-
mation, it lends itself to being understood as a form of labour insofar as the attending
subject is engaged in productive activity that promises economic gain. As Nabeth,
Roda, and Angehrn (2006, 3) surmise, “Attention can generally be associated with con-
sciousness: the attention of knowledge workers corresponds generally to the activity in
which they are currently engaged (such as writing a report, or having a conversation).”
Indeed, Jonathan Beller (2006, 4) has persuasively argued that we can find “in the
notion of ‘labor’ elaborated in Marx’s labour theory of value, the prototype of the
newest source of value production under capitalism today: value-producing human atten-
tion.” Given that cognitive capitalism imagines the processes of accumulating value as
being the product of mental labour and therefore largely immaterial and symbolic, then
the labour process itself is assumed to have become equally immaterial and symbolic.
Therefore, insofar as attention is understood as an activity undertaken by the individual
subject, it affords being metaphorically linked to those labour processes privileged
under cognitive capitalism. Attention, accordingly, has come to function as a source
domain for representing knowledge work. When attention is conceived of as the
finding and filtering of information, then it becomes a readily available resource for high-
lighting those aspects of the labour process that are cognitive whilst obscuring those that
are more ignominious and corporeal. In short, the attention-as-work metaphor comes to
make work visible as a collection of immaterial mental processes carried out by “knowl-
edge workers” in “information-rich environments,” which also leaves them under constant
threat of being over-loaded.
The AAS literature consistently represents the contemporary workplace as both
demanding attention and placing great demands on attention. Roda and Nabeth (2006,
685–686) determine that “knowledge workers have more risk to be overwhelmed by
too much information and too many interruptions, and also to manage inefficiently the
execution of the many tasks they have to accomplish for their work.” Elsewhere,
Nabeth, Roda, and Angehrn (2006, 4) draw upon a metaphor of a skipping stone to
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 11

describe the demands being placed upon the contemporary multi-tasking office worker:
“To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across
water all day long, touching down only periodically.” Invoking the proliferation of Com-
munication Information Technologies (CITs), Matlock et al. (2001, 721) similarly describe
the modern office as one where “specialized ‘information appliances’ … pervade our
work and everyday environments.” The wide-scale adoption of CITs in the workplace is
attributed with producing an abundance of information that exceeds human capacity
for full comprehension:
while technology has become the main source for information acquisition from the environ-
ment, the human sensory and memory capacities have failed to cope with the magnitude and
scale of the information they encounter. This situation generates opportunity for excessive
cognitive workloads, a major factor in degraded human performance. (Winchester III and
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Ntuen 2008, 3)

The result is a workplace in which on the one hand technology is said to be generative of a
greater number of worker interruptions and at the same time technology is also heralded
as a means to resolving this dilemma:
Interrupting users engaged in tasks typically has negative effects on their task completion
time, error rate, and affective state. Empirical research has shown that these negative
effects can be mitigated by deferring interruptions until more opportune moments in a
user’s task sequence. (Adamczyk, Iqbal, and Bailey 2005, 123)

In sum, the adoption of attention as a metaphor for knowledge work affords a represen-
tation of work as principally cognitive in nature and at the same time allows the work
process to be (re)embodied in workers and, ultimately, for employers to intercede in
the cognitive lives of workers. Thus, while Fordism, according to Gramsci, may have in
fact freed the brain of the factory worker (Gramsci 2000, 295), post-Fordist cognitive capit-
alism grants no such autonomy to its knowledge workers.
Not surprisingly then, attention is described not only as a limited resource in terms of
human cognitive ability, but it is increasingly constituted as a scarce organisational
resource or commodity. This is evidenced when Wilson and Miller (n.d., 1), citing
Bailey and Konstan (2006), write: “As users grow more and more dependent on comput-
ing systems, the demands on a user’s attention grow dramatically. In fact, user attention
may be rapidly becoming the scarcest resource in a computing environment.” This slip-
page from individual capacity to organisational resource is made explicit by Roda and
Nabeth (2008, 215) when they write: “In the context of work and business, attention is
defined as a ‘focussed mental engagement on a particular item of information,’ and
can be considered both at individual and organisational level.” Oft citing Davenport
and Beck (2005) and sometimes Goldhaber (1997), proponents of AAS charge that atten-
tion is “a rare commodity – and critical currency” (Horvitz et al. 2003, 52) and “the
element that counts the most in the information economy as it is the scarcest resource
and it is critical to organizations’ success” (Roda and Nabeth 2008, 215). Again, the
problem is not simply just to make people stay on task since the “nature” of cognitive
labour depends upon being able to work upon multiple tasks and to be receptive to
the right kinds of interruptions. As Lavie (2005, 81) elaborates using the load/engine
metaphor,
 12 I. RODERICK

Simply instructing people to focus attention on a certain task is not sufficient to prevent dis-
tractor interference. A high perceptual load that engages full attention in the task is also
needed. In contrast with the effects of perceptual load, high cognitive-control load increases
distractor interference, suggesting that cognitive control is needed for actively maintaining
the distinction between targets and distractors.

Indeed, borrowing the language of enterprise resource planning, Anicic, Stojanovic, and
Apostolou (2008, 2) make the claim for the development of enterprise attention manage-
ment systems which go “beyond informing a user proactively that something relevant has
been changed, toward proactive preparing and supporting the user to react on that
change.” Thus, AAS promise to do more than simply support human attention within
complex, distraction filled, accelerated work environments – they in fact produce attention
by translating the processes of selection, filtering, and focus from the efforts of individual
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workers to the attention apparatus of the organisation. Accordingly, I argue that the atten-
tion-as-work metaphor serves here to not simply represent workers’ attentional activities
as if they had been transferred to capital but rather to resemiotize (Iedema 2001) or trans-
late attention into labour and, ultimately, asset capital. In sum, attention is capitalised by
metaphoric translation through the use of labour as a source domain.

Attention management as a material metaphor of cognitive capitalism

If metaphors are more than simply figurative language adopted for rhetorical effect, then it
is because as semiotic resources, they not only structure ideas but action as well. From a
multimodal perspective, metaphors entail more than the transfer meanings from one
semiotic mode to another. Rather, they need to be understood as semiotic materialisations
(Machin 2016) that give structure to social action not only by functioning represen-
tationally but constitutively. In studying metaphors multimodally, then, we need to, as
Foucault (Foucault 1972, 47) enjoins, “‘derepresentify’ them” and instead investigate
them as part of the broader examination of “the regular formation of objects that
emerge only in discourse.” Because metaphors are discursive, they participate in the con-
stitution not only of our understanding of social realities but also how we build and act
within those realities. In this way, metaphors are fully implicated not just in the represen-
tation of power but also function as instruments of power (see Hook 2001) and so have
real material effects since “nothing is more material, physical, corporeal than the exercise
of power” (Foucault 1980, 57–58).
In her own account of the materiality of metaphor, Hayles (2002, 22–23) observes that
to “change the material artifact is to transform the context and circumstances for interact-
ing with the words, which inevitably changes the meanings of the words as well.” This is
very much akin to what Iedema (2001) terms resemiotization. Hayles (2002, 22) uses the
term “material metaphor” to describe the traffic between the material and the symbolic:
This kind of traffic, as old as the human species, is becoming increasingly important as the
symbol-processing machines we call computers are hooked into networks in which they
are seamlessly integrated with apparatus that can actually do things in the world, from the
sensors and actuators of mobile robots to the semiotic-material machinery that changes
the numbers in bank accounts.

To illustrate this point, Hayles draws upon the example of the boardroom-interface created
by the now digital copy of a CEO to manage his business affairs after death in Greg Egan’s
 SOCIAL SEMIOTICS 13

(2008) science-fiction novel Permutation City. The computer interface is, on the one hand, a
representation of how he conducted business as a biological entity but it is also metapho-
ric in that it translates symbols into material effects. Hayles (2002, 48) posits that “the force
of material metaphors” is their ability to “control, direct, and amplify this traffic between
the physical actions the work calls forth and structures, and the imaginative world the arti-
fact creates with all its verbal, visual, acoustic, kinesthetic, and functional properties.” As an
interface, then, the boardroom metaphor bridges the interspace between the two
domains translating the symbols into material artefacts and events.
AAS can equally be understood as material metaphors since they would function as an
interface between the attention apparatus of the workers and their work environment.
AAS will organise and manage worker attention within the distraction-filled environments
that the organisations themselves establish as the conditions under which their employ-
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ees will work. Furthermore, when it is claimed that the introduction of AAS will work to
support employee attentional processes and secure “the alignment of the individuals’
goals and the company’s goal (and ensure that the attention of the employees is properly
oriented toward items relevant to the strategic objectives of the organization)” (Roda and
Nabeth 2006, 2), it becomes clear that AAS would organise and order worker engagements
with their work environment in very specific ways so as to enrol the individual worker’s
own attention apparatus into what is construed as an organisation’s attentional apparatus.
In other words, as a material metaphor, the AAS interface does not just carry traffic
between the domains of attention as a cognitive process and that of attention as
labour. Instead, it translates that traffic so that the attentional efforts of the workers can
be made into organisational capital. As a material metaphor, AAS do more than represent
attention as labour since they do not just frame and structure how we think about work in
the context of the cognitive capitalism thesis but also frame and structure how work will
actually be organised and performed.

Conclusion
As discursive resources, metaphors are semiotic materialisations that function not only
representationally to structure thought but also give structure to social action. By derepre-
sentifying metaphor, we can better understand how metaphors are integral to materialis-
ing the realities in which embodied actors act. This necessitates greater scrutiny of the
ways in which metaphors, as triadic relations, do not just associate properties between
domains but actively translate them. In this way, metaphors are of particular interest to
critical discourse analysts since they do not just serve as representations of inequalities
in power relations but are in fact fully implicated in the enactment of those power
relations.
To illustrate this, I have sought to show how attention as a cognitive process comes to
be translated into a financial activity (labour), an organisational resource (capital), and, ulti-
mately, something to be micro-managed on-the-fly. This “cognitisation” of labour is
accomplished semiotically by using metaphors that translate work into a largely mental
activity in which the materials and processes of labour become de-materialised as infor-
mation and attention. As an inter-face, AAS functions as the space in-between attention-
as-cognition and attention-as-labour, translating attention into the material practices of
cognitive capitalism and knowledge work. Accordingly, the AAS interface does not just
 14 I. RODERICK

carry traffic between the domains of cognition and knowledge work. Beyond framing and
structuring how we think about work in the context of the cognitive capitalism thesis, as a
material metaphor, AAS frame and structure how work will actually be organised and per-
formed. Thus, the attention-as-work metaphor serves not to represent workers’ attentional
activities as if they had been transferred to capital but rather to translate attention into
labour and, ultimately, organisational asset capital. In sum, the capitalisation of attention
is made possible through a process of metaphoric translation that makes labour more like
cognition and cognition more like labour.

Note
1. A total of 94 academic articles, papers and presentations on workplace attention in the disci-
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plines of computer science, ergonomics and cognitive psychology were consulted.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Ian Roderick is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.
His research interests are in Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies with a current focus upon neolib-
eral organisational forms and their mediation in work and education.

ORCID
Ian Roderick http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8040-9329

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