AOL’s alignment of the new technology entering American homes with a new social interest of individuals was not without cultural context. No adoption of technology ever is. In this case, it might be seen as part of a progression we have been following right along in this book, that of the individual in society. We have seen it as the attention industries shifted their focus from the mass of consumers to a diverse range of identities and variously constituted market segments.
But to understand where the attention industries would wind up, why our present attentional environment looks the way it does, another phenomenon centered on the individual must be addressed: the individual as deity, as object of worshipful attention.
The first great harvester of human attention, it must never be forgotten, was religion. The impulse to idolize has not faded in our secular age, only gone seeking after strange gods. The very expression “celebrity worship” may seem a figurative exaggeration; but insofar as intensity and duration of attention can separate devotion from other motivations, it would be hard to argue that what we have seen in our culture is anything less than an apotheosis. Still, in our predominantly monotheistic sense of religion, the idea of describing our intense regard for people who are famous as being essentially religious may ring false. But if we would remember that the ancient version of celebrity was a hero, and that the line between heroes and deities was never absolute, who could dispute that our attention industries have enabled the creation of a new pantheon? And as we shall see, it was the indefinite expansion of that pantheon that would carry the attention merchants into the twenty-first century.