Category Archives: conference

Revisiting Stiegler’s understanding of Technicity and Attention

We haven’t blogged here for a while but the Digital Cultures Research Centre (DCRC) continues to work on the theme of the attention economy. We have a themed journal issue derived from Paying Attention under development and Patrick Crogan has been convening … Continue reading

Posted in reflection

Paying Attention Video

The Digital Cultures Research Centre have commissioned the above video as both documentation and a creative response to the Paying Attention conference held in Linköping last September.  The video features excerpts from the conference creatively re-interpreted by Sy Taffel.  We … Continue reading

Posted in video

Google Will Make Us Free – Simon Poulter

Simon Poulter has made available online the videos that formed a significant part of his performance “Google Will Make Us Free” at Paying Attention 2010. You can see the videos and read Simon’s accompanying notes on his website: http://www.simonpoulter.co.uk/google-free.htm. The … Continue reading

Posted in conference, video

The technics of attention

Attention, as a capacity, is always and already situated in a socio-technical milieu, within which it is invited, cajoled, conditioned and broken. This has not least been brought into sharp relief in the contemporary milieu by global communications networks, and … Continue reading

Posted in conference review | 2 Comments

Performance and the performativity of attention

As an embodied capacity, both cognitive and affective, attention is inherently performative, it takes place in the performance of everyday life. Instances of attention have particular durations and carry varying forms of significance. A number of papers, presentations and interventions … Continue reading

Posted in conference, conference review

Governance and the codification of attention

The corollary to the economic framework of addressing attention as a commodity is the ensuing political economic logic for codifying and governing the means of illiciting and controlling attention. A number of papers addressed emerging forms of governance for an … Continue reading

Posted in conference, conference review

The ‘globality’ of an attention economy and ‘uneven distribution’

If the attention economy is a system for valuing and trading in attention as a form of commodity then issues around distribution and its geographically variable nature are important considerations. Throughout the conference there were presentations which addressed both the … Continue reading

Posted in conference, conference review, reflection

Ethics, Surveillance and Trust

The attention economy provokes significant questions about the ways in which consumers/users can understand information about them, how it used, commodified and valued, where it is kept, who has access to it, and why the others within those relations can/cannot … Continue reading

Posted in conference, conference review, reflection

The biological capacity for attention, and its (re)configuration

Tiziana Terranova expertly laid out in her keynote paper the means by which the attention economy, and its Homo Economicus – the ‘subject of interest’ that is always assessing and calculating the worth and value of information -finds a corollary … Continue reading

Posted in conference, conference review, reflection

Attention as a commodity and the problem of exchange value

Following late 20th century work by Georg Franck and Michael Goldhaber, we can understand attention as a key tenet to the discourse that encompasses ‘the new economy’ or ‘digital economy’ of new media. If an economy is the way in … Continue reading

Posted in conference, conference review, reflection