Online seminar series on Attending as practice in the attention economy
Within the
ESDiT (Ethics
of Socially Disruptive Technologies) project, the working group on Attention
Economy organizes an online seminar-series on Attending as practice in the
attention economy.
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).
Speakers currently planned:
When
Who
Title
Wednesday, October 5, 2022, 13:30 PM -15:00 PM CEST
James Williams
'A Lightbulb for the Mind: Possible Futures for the Attention Economy'
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 9:00 AM-10:30 AM CEST
Peter
Hershock
Intelligent Technology, the Attention Economy, and the Risks of Consciousness
Hacking: A Buddhist Perspective
Wednesday, November 23, 2022 10:30 AM-12:00 PM CET
Silvia Caprioglio
Panizza
Grounding ethics through attention: Murdoch, Weil, and Zen Buddhism
Wednesday, December 14, 2022 10:30 AM-12:00 PM CET
Soraj
Hongladarom
Toward an Ethics of Attention.
Interested in attending?
Please write to Secretariat.P&E@tue.nl which of
these sessions you want to attend. You will then receive a link to join the
online seminar.
We are looking forward discussing this with you.
Gunter Bombaerts, Joel Anderson, Matthew Dennis, Lily Frank, Tom Hannes,
Jeroen Hopster, Madelaine Ley, Lavinia Marin, Alessio Gerola and Andreas
Spahn
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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