Attention! - II: Language, Expertise, and Labor

Abstract

In recent years, attention has become a topic of increasing public concern. Digital distractions, addictive design patterns, and ad-driven platforms are said to be decreasing individual attention spans; political crises are described as canny distractions or failures of collective attention. Meanwhile, academic critics call for new forms of attention as solutions to analytic and political problems. This panel will draw together work that attends to attention, using the analytic tools of STS to foreground “attention” itself as an object bound up with the social production of knowledge, scientific and technical infrastructures, and broader discourses of economic value and cultural values. What work does the concept of attention perform in popular and expert conversations? How might closer attention to attention interrupt common sense discourses about its value and purpose? What work can attention perform, when it is attended to with greater precision and care?

Chair

• Nick Seaver, Tufts University

Individual Presentations

• Listening/Not Listening: Educations of Inattention in the Automation of Psychiatric Assessment - Beth Semel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• The Architecture of "Attention": Uncrumpling NLP’s Linguistic Ideologies - Michael Castelle, University of Warwick

• Valuing Inattention and Invisibility - Ville Savolainen, Tampere University; Olli Pyyhtinen, Tampere University

• Visualizing the Expertise of Attention: Politics and Difference from Early Psychophysics to Mindful Economics - Chad Valasek, University of California at San Diego

Session Organizer

• Rebecca Jablonsky, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute