Since the 20th century, attention has been a key concept for explaining the emergence of public spheres, even beyond the specialized discourses of science and journalism. In the context of digital social media, non-attention is also increasingly being addressed and elevated to a normative participation model. What was still limited to digital protest practices a few years ago is now widespread: a digital attention ethic that demands that content is not be shared and that certain actors and topics are not given a platform. Understood in this way, public spheres are the result of positive and negative participation in attention, and the modulation of collective attention is generalized beyond a journalistic professional ethos to become a maxim for individual media users.
The research project uses case studies to investigate various calls for attention withdrawal in digital social networks. We are interested in how these calls are justified and negotiated, with which other "disconnective" practices of public regulation they are connected and what explicit and implicit media knowledge is expressed in them: for example knowledge about algorithmic processes, about affective structures of the public and about the role and agency of different users. In this context, the figure of social cohesion, or its endangerment through polarization and division, appears as a justification horizon to legitimize or delegitimize practices of withdrawing attention.
Two allegations are quickly made against calls for withdrawal of attention in social media: first, that they prevent public exchange and, second, that there is an inherent paradox: attention is drawn back precisely through the call for withdrawal. Instead of judging those practices as irrational or deficient, we look at them as forms of ambivalent participation in the digital public sphere. From this perspective, it is then possible to analyze how this ambivalence is negotiated by users of social media themselves; which tactics emerge to resolve ambivalences, or how different rules and standards of publicity are positioned against each other.