1st Edition
The Politics of Curiosity Alternatives to the Attention Economy
Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the politics of distraction, it offers a new and multi-disciplinary conceptualization of attention that emphasizes the connections between attention and curiosity, distraction, decoloniality and care. Above all, The Politics of Curiosity asks us to consider the nature and ambivalence of the curious forms of politics that might be taking shape in the shadow of our current attention economy.
The “attention economy” has become a household name: we all know our attention is being harvested, commodified and packaged to be sold to advertisers by capitalist platforms. We all complain about it; some of us dream of disconnection; others call to fight back. By focusing on attentional deficits, and by reducing attention to being focused, however, the common view may miss wider stakes, and more promising opportunities. This collective volume provides a new frame of analysis based on three displacements. First, it relocates attentional issues within a triangulation that explores a continuum between attention, distraction and curiosity. Second, it invites us to investigate into the mental infrastructures that socially condition our perceptions and understandings of the world. Third, it points towards emancipatory politics of curiosity to provide alternatives to the attention economy. Contributions range from pedagogy to media theory, via digital studies, epistemology, sociology, political philosophy, literary history, aesthetics, film and dance studies. They gather some of the leading scholars who shaped the study of attention, questioned the values of distraction and explored the potentials of curiosity over the recent years. They extend across nine countries, four continents and seven languages, to provide a multicultural approach to these debates. Together, they help us understand how our current mental infrastructures have taken shape, under specific regimes of power and authority, in a world dominated by capital, colonialism and patriarchy. But they also sketch what can be done to redeploy them around imperatives of respect and care – from a better awareness of our mental biases, online behaviors and bodily movements, to our collective capacity to restructure classroom interactions, to launch alternative digital platforms, to build democratic movements.
The first platform for discussion of the politics of attention and curiosity – and an essential point of reference for future debate – this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and psychology.
Introduction: Attention, Distraction, and Curiosity: Remantling Our Mental Infrastructures
Enrico Campo and Yves Citton
Triangulating Our Mental Infrastructures Towards an Ecology of Remantlement
From Attention to Distraction
Reclaiming Curiosity
Redefining Curiosity
Political Ambivalences of Curiosity
PART I: Critical Views on Attention
1 Quick Bites: Short-Form Attention in the Era of Platform Capitalism
Kenneth Rogers
Quick Bites
Adderall
Doomscrolling Towards Oblivion
Disinformation Overload
TikTok Brain
ADHD Crazy
Profiles of Attention
Disabling Wi-Fi
2 The Socio-cognitive Politics of Curiosity and Attention
Wayne H. Brekhus and Lorenzo Sabetta
Introduction
Marked and Unmarked: Attentional Curiosity and Uncuriosity
Socio-cognitive Cultures of Attention
Academic Curiosity, Epistemological Exclusion, and the Reproduction of Unmarked Power
Academic Attention on Social Change: The Hidden Normative Power of Unchange
Scholarly Curiosity and the Unmarking of Everyday Reality: The Epistemological Reproduction of the Social Order and the Power of the Unmarked
Conclusion: Expanding Our Attentional Politics and Unbounding Our Academic Curiosity
3 On the Historical Co-construction of "Good" Attention and "Bad" Curiosity
David Roulier
How to Circumvent the Impossible Definition of Attention
How to Sketch a Brief History of Early Modern Attention
Three Stages in the Elaboration of Modern Attention
From a History of Attention to a Politics of Curiosity
4 Two Attacks on Attention
Paul North
Attack by Frustration
Attack by Falsification
One Final Assault
5 A Writing Workshop: Arts of Joint Attention, Curiosity, and Care in University
Virginia Kastrup, Luciana Caliman, and Veronica Torres Gurgel
Attention and Care
A Writing Workshop During the Pandemic
Workshop on the Razor’s Edge
Attention to Self in the Workshop
The Challenge of University Writing and the Road to Joint Attention
PART II: Digital Mental Infrastructures
6 Curiosity Among the Ruins of Homo Faber: Infrastructural Capitalism and the Politics of Care
Vando Borghi
"You Are Here": Homo Faber in Infrastructural Capitalism
Our Heritage: The Ruins of Homo Faber
Curiosity Among the Ruins: Towards a Politics of Care
7 The Drift of Attention Regimes in the Age of Digital Platforms: When Curiosity Was Taken Over by Reputation
Dominique Boullier
Introduction
The Four Moments of a Drift
Search Engines That Now Provide Answers
Publish for Yourself or Publish for Buzz: From CMS to Twitter
Contributing Together in Wikis or Delegating to Generative AI
Sharing Content or Pushing Content
Regimes of Attention Adrift
What the Financial Economy Has Done to Curiosity
Conclusion
8 The Digital Market of Interests and Feelings
Carina Albrecht and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Introduction
The Interest Economy
From Interest to Sentiment: The Origins of Free Labour?
Disaffection
PART III: Praises of Distraction
9 Distraction and Its Doppelgangers
Paul Sztulman and Dork Zabunyan
Distraction as a Modality of Attention
True to Its Etymology
Negativity of Zerstreuung
The Distraction Parade
The Distracted Perception of the Seer
Distraction: A Counter-method
Distraction and the Future of the Masses
10 Art and the Power of Distraction: Bergson, Benjamin, and Simone Weil
Alessandra Aloisi
Introduction
Art and the Power of Distraction
Distraction and the Method of Philosophy
Bergson, Benjamin, and Simone Weil
Conclusion
11 Curious Entities of Attentive Distraction
Millaray Lobos Garcia
Chilean Politics of Curiosity
Duendes, Cats, Butterflies
Political Distractions
Political Beings of Distraction
Unconditional Curiosity
Curious Modes of Propagation (Boquila trifolioliata)
The Smile Outside
PART IV: Promises of Curiosities
12 From the Economy of Attention to the Politics of Curiosity: A Conversation With Georg Franck
Georg Franck
13 Platforms of Curiosities: Weird Ways of Publishing Movies
Jacopo Rasmi
Introduction
Curiosity in the Age of Digital Distribution
What Is a Shadow Platform?
Between Curiosities and Study
Between Folk Archiving and Re-publishing
Platforms for Curiosities
14 Tribulations of Curiosity
Lionel Manga
(Profitable?) Discoveries
(Primitive?) Explorations
Inquisitors Versus Curiosae
Evangelism Versus Mvett
(Indisciplined?) Hominescence
15 On the Variety of Attentional Practices
D. Graham Burnett
Coming to Attention
Getting Lost in the Matter
A New Age of Curiosity
The Problem With Aiming
Soft Eyes, Grasshopper
How the Birds See
When Experience Becomes Form
Attention and Friendship
And So . . .
Postlude: Sticking With Speculation: A Practice in Noticing Attention
Asaf Bachrach And Joe Dumit
A Stick Practice
A Grasping Practice
A Measure/Modulation Practice
A Meta-statement/a Belated Introduction
Subjects of Our Own Experiments
A Curious Stick Practice
Biography
Enrico Campo is a research fellow of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan, Italy. His research interests include sociological theory, sociology of knowledge and the study of the relations among culture, technology and cognition. He is the author of Attention and its Crisis in Digital Society (Routledge, 2022), and co-editor of Exploring the Crisis. Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Investigations (2015).
Yves Citton is Professor of Literature and Media at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, France. His work explores the political imagination of Western modernity through dialogue between Enlightenment texts and contemporary political philosophy. He is author of Mediarchy (2019) and The Ecology of Attention (2016) and co-editor of the French journal Multitudes. His website is www.yvescitton.net and includes numerous open-access articles.
“A compelling and essential collection of innovative and urgent explorations of the intertwined problems of attention, distraction and curiosity”
Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA and author of Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (1999)
“This exciting volume brings together scholars, artists, and critics from a wide gamut of fields, with a diverse array of interests and approaches. Together, collaboratively, they reveal to us the surprising depths of the theoretical problem of attention, as also the alarming depth of the current political and economic crisis of attention. This book is bound to change the way we navigate these depths, and may even help us, if we pay it the attention it deserves, to find a way out of the crisis.”
Justin Smith-Ruiu, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Université Paris Cité, France and co-editor of Scenes of Attention (2023)
