ESDiT online seminar series
on "Attending as practice in the attention economy"
How can attention-seeking be good?
Cor van de Weele
Tuesday, December 12, 2023, 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Would you be interested in attending? Please write to
Secretariat.P&E@tue.nl if you want to
participate in this session (or others; see below).
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:
When (CET)
Who
Title
Friday, January 12, 2024 4:00 PM-5:30 PM
Mark Fortney
Loving Attention: Buddhaghosa, Katsuki Sekida, and Iris Murdoch on Meditation
and Moral Development
We are looking forward discussing this with you.
Gunter Bombaerts, Alessio Gerola, Andreas Spahn, Anna Puzio, Jeroen Hopster,
Joseph Sta. Maria, Lyanne Uhlhorn, Madelaine Ley, Lavinia Marin, Lily Frank,
Madelaine Ley, Matthew Dennis, and Tom Hannes
Previous sessions
Check the recordings of the session at the ESDiT website
here.
Who
Title
Peter Hershock
Intelligent Technology, the Attention Economy, and the Risks of Consciousness
Hacking: A Buddhist Perspective
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Grounding ethics through attention: Murdoch, Weil, and Zen Buddhism
Soraj Hongladarom
Toward an Ethics of Attention.
Dan Nixon
Just Perceive: How Phenomenology and the Arts Can Guide Us in the Tech Era.
Sebastian Watzl and Katharine Naomi Whitfield Browne
The Commodification of Attention. An analysis and ethical assessment.
Tom Hannes
The attention of ethics.
Matthew Dennis
Repurposing Persuasive Technologies for Digital Well-Being.
Yves Citton and Enrico Campo
From the Attention Economy to a Politics of Curiosity
Galit Wellner
The co-shaping of attention and technologies
Gloria Mark
Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and
Productivity
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".
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