ESDiT online seminar series on “Attending as practice in the attention economy”

Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

Gloria Mark

Tuesday, October 31, 2023, 4:00 PM-5:30 PM 

Interested in attending? Please write to Secretariat.P&E@tue.nl if you want to participate in this session (or others; see below).

Teaser: “Ever wonder how you might stay better focused and on task? In this talk, I’ll explain the science of why we’re so often distracted and will present solutions to help you improve your focus.”

Dr. Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research for ten years. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. Her research concerns understanding the impact of digital media on people's lives, and she is best known for her work in studying people's multitasking, mood and behavior while using their computers and phones in real world environments. In 2017 she was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in recognition for her contribution to the field of human-computer interaction. She has published in the top journals and conferences in this field, has received numerous paper awards, serves on editorial boards of ACM TOCHI and Human-Computer Interaction, has been a Fulbright scholar and has received the prestigious National Science Foundation Career grant. She has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival and her work on multitasking has appeared in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, the BBC, CBS Sunday Morning, and many others.  Her new book is Attention Span, published by Harper Collins: Hanover Square Press.

Aim: The online series aims to contribute, using philosophy and ethics, to constructively critique the attention economy (the tech industry's business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource).

Other sessions

The upcoming sessions will be:

We are looking forward to discussing this with you.

Gunter Bombaerts, Alessio Gerola, Andreas Spahn, Anna Puzio, Jeroen Hopster, Joseph Sta. Maria

Madelaine Ley, Lavinia Marin, Lily Frank, Madelaine Ley, Matthew Dennis, Tom Hannes

Previous sessions

Check the recordings of the session at the ESDiT website here.

Background

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry's business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user's autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control.

While this push back is important, it uncritically accepts the framing of attention as a scarce commodity, giving rise to incomplete assessments of the moral significance of attention, and obscuring richer sets of ethical strategies to cope with the challenges of the attention economy.

We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, by approaching attention as practice.

The series engages with speakers from all kinds of backgrounds (philosophy on authors like Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Simone Weil, Merleau-Ponty, Harry Frankfurt, or Buddhist ethics …; psychology; artificial intelligence; …).

Questions that will be central in the online series:

1-What do attention and related concepts mean in the “attention economy”?

2-How is attention a basis for or related to morality?

3-How can attention (and related concepts) be built in the design of the attention economy in a humane way?

To answer this last question, we think the philosophical debate should turn from a negative to a positive focus:

• From “What are the distractions?” to “How can wisdom practices, virtues, … support a desirable form of attention?”;
• From “I must take back control of my attention” to “How can we use attention for flourishing, wisdom, …?”;
• From reacting against “promising (false?) free comfort” to supporting “acceptance of necessary effort”; and
• From “increasing individual needs in the attention economy” to support “collective or intentional joint attention in the attention ecology”.