Culture Machine, 13: Paying Attention (2012)

“This issue of Culture Machine sets itself two interrelated tasks in response to the scope and implications of these interrelated positions concerning attention, consciousness, culture, economics and politics. Firstly, it interrogates the notion of attention as it is elaborated in approaches to the attention economy and to media as forms of attention capture. The essays by three leading contributors to thinking in and around these themes, Bernard Stiegler, Tiziana Terranova, and Jonathan Beller, have such an interrogation as their principal task. They develop different, overlapping and sometimes contrasting perspectives on how a critical reposing of the question of attention might reframe its purchase on the central themes of the relation between interiority and exteriority, minds and media, economics and culture. The interview with Michel Bauwens, and the essays by Ben Roberts and Sy Taffel, are also working toward this end in that they identify various limitations and exclusions of the predominant articulation of the attention economy and move toward alternative, more productive, ethical or socially just formulations.

The second task of this issue is pursued in the essays of Tania Bucher, Martin Thayne, Rolien Hoyng and the three contributions to the additional section of the issue. These three – from Ruth Catlow, Constance Fleuriot and Bjarke Liboriussen – represent less scholarly but no less acute strategic inquiries into the thinking and re-making of what Stiegler calls attentional technics. Together, these contributions address particular instantiations of media forms, design practices and phenomena – from Facebook and Second Life to pervasive media design and Istanbul’s digitally mediated City of European Culture project – as a way of exploring and critically inflecting the implementation of the attention economy. This second mode moves from material phenomena to theoretical analysis and critique, while the first goes the other way. As we have argued, however, the necessity of the traffic between them is a central tenet of how we endeavour to pay attention to contemporary digital technoculture in this issue.” (from the introduction)

Edited by Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley
Publisher Open Humanities Press
Open Access
ISSN 1465-4121

PDFs (updated on 2019-5-8)