Abstract

Contemporary discussions of collective attention in digital environments often presuppose its existence without specifying the conditions under which it emerges, stabilizes, or fragments. This paper reconceptualizes collective attention not as shared mental focus or institutionally coordinated practice, but as an emergent socio-technical phenomenon grounded in the regulation of inference under uncertainty. Drawing on predictive processing, attention is defined as a structuring effort that governs how environmental information is received to support action-guiding inference. The paper develops a precision-based framework distinguishing two ideal-typical regimes: organic attention, which arises when precision remains responsive to uncertainty; and mechanistic attention, which emerges when precision is decoupled from temporal engagement density and redirected by engagement-optimizing architectures—a phenomenon conceptualized as precision hijacking. The framework is operationalized through two system-level indicators—Collective Free Energy (CFE) and Precision Alignment Index (PAI)—applied to temporal interaction data from Wikipedia talk pages. Empirical analysis of Wikipedia talk pages (N = 379,978 articles, N = 191,372 contributors) reveals a collective attention regime characterized by substantial CFE (41,649,821.60), moderate PAI (0.089), and a highly skewed precision distribution (Median = 0.000). Results demonstrate that collective attention can stabilize in minimally institutionalized digital ecologies, exhibiting bounded collective free energy and structured precision alignment. The weak and complex correlation between temporal engagement and precision (Pearson r = 0.059, Spearman ρ = −0.172) suggests that these dimensions are partially coupled but moderated by other factors. These findings show that institutionalization enhances stability but is not a necessary condition for collective attentional emergence. The paper contributes a diagnostic framework for analyzing digital attention economies and offers new resources for the governance of collective sense-making.

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