The Politics of Curiosity: Alternatives to the Attention Economy

Description

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... Read more

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.

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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

Editor(s)

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.

Critics' Reviews

“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)

"This edited, interdisciplinary collection aims to reframe the attention economy and identify alternatives to it by exploring the connections between attention, distraction, and curiosity and examining the “mental infrastructures” conditioned by “acquired habits, technical networks, sociopolitical institutions, and cultural schemas” (p. 1). Fifteen chapters grouped into sections titled “Critical Views on Attention,” “Digital Mental Infrastructures,” “Praises of Distraction,” and “Promises of Curiosities” address aspects of these aims from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints but ultimately lack cohesion. There is no unifying conclusion; the postlude is a “practice in noticing attention” that invites readers to take part in an exercise to explore their own attention and curiosity. While researchers and scholars may find selections from this volume useful, the writing is often dense and inaccessible to those newly exploring the topic."

L. Skaggs, Illinois State University, CHOICE

The Politics of Curiosity Alternatives to the Attention Economy

Description

Table of Contents

Editor(s)

Biography

Critics' Reviews

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