PAYING ATTENTION: Towards a Critique of the Attention Economy.
By Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley.
CULTURE MACHINE VOL 13 • 2012
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current
With essays by Patrick Crogan, Samuel Kinsley, Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana
Terranova, Jonathan Beller, Michel Bauwens, Sy Taffel, Ben Roberts,
Taina Bucher, Martyn Thayne, Rolien Hoyng, Bjarke Liboriussen, Ursula
Plesner, Ruth Catlow and Constance Fleuriot
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The European Science Foundation conference, ‘Paying Attention: Digital
Media Cultures and Intergenerational Responsibility, was convened by
Professor Jonathan Dovey and Patrick Crogan and Sam Kinsley of the
Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England,
Bristol, in September 2010 to gather the input and insights of creative
practitioners exploring critical and alternative uses of new media forms
and technologies. URL = http://www.payingattention.org
"‘Paying Attention’ concerns the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the
attention economy. This is the social and technical milieu in which web
native generations live much of their lives. It will address key
questions like: What architectures of power are at work in the attention
economy ? How is it building new structures of experience? What kinds of
value does this architecture produce? ‘Paying Attention’ encourages
dialogue between researchers from the fields of Cultural and New Media
Studies, Education, Communications, Economics, Internet studies, Human
Computer Interface Studies, Art and Design. It also seeks the input and
insights of creative practitioners exploring critical and alternative
uses of new media forms and technologies.
Through an ever-burgeoning technical apparatus of surveying, data mining
and internet search-tailoring the attention of individual minds is
estimated, costed, marketed, bought and sold. The ‘attention economy’ is
enabled by technologies like Google’s web-crawler and search algorithms
and agents and all kinds of metadata production. The dominance of this
mode of conceiving and calculating attention, above all that of the
young, can be seen to be bearing fruit in many national, regional and
global phenomena. The traditional values of the public sphere are
unmistakably reshaped though these processes.
‘Paying Attention’ is also interested in how practices such as
videogaming, P2P Filesharing, pervasive media experimentation, and
mobile phone activism also create detours, reinventions and reimaginings
of the cultural program to which younger generations are recruited.
While there is a concerted effort to commercialise and exploit these
spaces according to the demands of the global media industries, web
2.0’s reorientation of social communication practices remains charged
with an indeterminate techno-cultural potential which the conference
seeks to explore."
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