"Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness-to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces?
This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying-and often failing-to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.
Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of ""surveillance capitalism,"" and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible."
Edited by:
D. Graham Burnett,
Justin E. H. Smith
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231211192
ISBN 10: 0231211198
Pages: 376
Publication Date: 22 December 2023
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction, by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith Part I. Histories of Attention 1. The Discovery of Attention, by Richard J. Spiegel 2. Attention and Boredom in Early American Psychology, by Henry M. Cowles 3. Attending to the Birds: Ornithologists and Listening, by Alexandra Hui 4. Attention, Art, and Psychotherapeutics, by Julian Chehirian Part II. Philosophies of Attention 5. Attention: Mechanism and Virtue, by Carlos Montemayor 6. Attention, Technology, and Creativity, by Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Shadab Tabatabaeian 7. Attention to Absence and Imagination, by Jonardon Ganeri 8. Dispatch from the Jhāna Wars: Attention Practice in Online Buddhism, by John Tresch Part III. Attention, Technology, Culture 9. Wearable Attention: Course-Correction for Wandering Minds, by Natasha Dow Schüll 10. Attentional ‘Ownership’: Online Education and Self-Possession, by Brian Yuan 11. Attention is All You Need: Humans and Computers in the Time of Neural Networks Nick Seaver 12. Medium Focus, by Joanna Fiduccia Part IV. Endgame(s) 13. Attention Fast, Attention Slow: Obsession, Compulsion, Holding Close, by Yael Geller 14. Units of Intensive Care: Poetic Attention and the Precarious Body, by Lucy Alford Bibliography List of Contributors Index
D. Graham Burnett is a professor of history and the history of science at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the IHUM interdisciplinary doctoral program. His scholarly books on cartography, empire, optics, and the oceans have examined the changing understanding of nature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Burnett is associated with the research collective ESTAR(SER) and the activist coalition “The Friends of Attention,” with whom he coauthored Twelve Theses on Attention (2022). Justin E. H. Smith is professor of the history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité and a member of the SPHERE Laboratory for Research in the History of Science. He is the author of five books, most recently The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning (2022), and a frequent contributor to a number of popular publications. In 2015 a main-belt asteroid, 4.5 kilometers in diameter, was named after him: 13585 Justinsmith (1993 TC20).
Reviews for Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses
This book brings together beautifully written and diverse perspectives on attention: as phenomenon, scholarly practice, memoir, meditation, metahistory, and art. Required reading in an era of exponential financialization and attention deficit disorder at civilizational scale. -- Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google Research Scenes of Attention is, in all the best ways, scholarly, inspiring, and unsettling. Its diverse contributors address this most urgent of topics so wisely, and articulate the results of their thinking with such readable lucidity, that one feels as if the complexities of attention had been brought freshly before us, in higher definition than before, and with a depth than had previously been foreshortened. -- Christopher Mole, author of <i>Attention Is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology</i> A very stimulating volume, Scenes of Attention revolves around the question of how best to approach, understand, and respond to the 'crisis of attention' that we all feel, to varying degrees, in the age of hypermediated multitaskery. These essays provide an interdisciplinary inquiry into the most pressing (and enduring) issues around the attention ecology. -- Dominic Pettman, author of <i>Infinite Distraction</i>
