Paying Attention

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= "The European Science Foundation conference, ‘Paying Attention: Digital Media Cultures and Intergenerational Responsibility, was convened by Professor Jonathan Dovey and Patrick Crogan and Sam Kinsley of the , Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2010 to gather the input and insights of creative practitioners exploring critical and alternative uses of new media forms and technologies."

URL = http://www.payingattention.org

Participant essays via Culture Machine, vol. 13, at http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current



Conference

‘PAYING ATTENTION: DIGITAL MEDIA CULTURES AND GENERATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY’

A European Science Foundation Research Conference, Linkoping, Sweden 7 – 10th Sept 2010


Organised by the Digital Cultures Research Centre at the University of the West of England.


Chairs:

  1. Professor Jonathan Dovey, Director, Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England
  2. Dr Patrick Crogan, Department of Culture, Media and Drama, University of the West of England.


‘Paying Attention’ concerns the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the attention economy. This is the social and technical milieu in which web native generations live much of their lives. It will address key questions like: What architectures of power are at work in the attention economy ? How is it building new structures of experience? What kinds of value does this architecture produce? ‘Paying Attention’ encourages dialogue between researchers from the fields of Cultural and New Media Studies, Education, Communications, Economics, Internet studies, Human Computer Interface Studies, Art and Design. It also seeks the input and insights of creative practitioners exploring critical and alternative uses of new media forms and technologies.


Through an ever-burgeoning technical apparatus of surveying, data mining and internet search-tailoring the attention of individual minds is estimated, costed, marketed, bought and sold. The ‘attention economy’ is enabled by technologies like Google’s web-crawler and search algorithms and agents and all kinds of metadata production. The dominance of this mode of conceiving and calculating attention, above all that of the young, can be seen to be bearing fruit in many national, regional and global phenomena. The traditional values of the public sphere are unmistakably reshaped though these processes.


‘Paying Attention’ is also interested in how practices such as videogaming, P2P Filesharing, pervasive media experimentation, and mobile phone activism also create detours, reinventions and reimaginings of the cultural program to which younger generations are recruited. While there is a concerted effort to commercialise and exploit these spaces according to the demands of the global media industries, web 2.0’s reorientation of social communication practices remains charged with an indeterminate techno-cultural potential which the conference seeks to explore.


Proceedings

URL = http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current

Selection:

  • Attention, Economy and the Brain, Tiziana Terranova [1]
  • Friends Like Mine: The Production of Socialised Subjectivity in the Attention Economy. Martyn Thayne [3]