Description
Book SynopsisThis book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature.
Trade ReviewThis book brings together beautifully written and diverse perspectives on attention: as phenomenon, scholarly practice, memoir, meditation, metahistory, and art. Required reading in an era of exponential financialization and attention deficit disorder at civilizational scale. -- Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google Research
These vivid and varied essays are a much-needed antidote to the flattened attention of the click economy. Here are the many dimensions of attention we've been missing: historical, philosophical, psychological, anthropological, and, yes, technological. This timely collection broadens and deepens current debates about the future of attention—and distraction. -- Lorraine Daston, author of
Rules: A Short History of What We Live ByScenes of Attention is, in all the best ways, scholarly, inspiring, and unsettling. Its diverse contributors address this most urgent of topics so wisely, and articulate the results of their thinking with such readable lucidity, that one feels as if the complexities of attention had been brought freshly before us, in higher definition than before, and with a depth that had previously been foreshortened. -- Christopher Mole, author of
Attention Is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical PsychologyA wonderfully eclectic examination of attention,
Scenes of Attention illuminates this central aspect of mind through different vignettes and rich theoretical perspectives that reveal the diversity of how we attend, how attention is shaped, manipulated and transformed. Accessible and engaging, it will provide ample material for productive reflection. -- Wayne Wu, author of
Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention and ActionA very stimulating volume,
Scenes of Attention revolves around the question of how best to approach, understand, and respond to the 'crisis of attention' that we all feel, to varying degrees, in the age of hypermediated multitaskery. These essays provide an interdisciplinary inquiry into the most pressing (and enduring) issues around the attention ecology. -- Dominic Pettman, author of
Infinite DistractionTable of ContentsIntroduction, by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith
Part I. Histories of Attention1. The Discovery of Attention, by Richard J. Spiegel
2. Attention and Boredom in Early American Psychology, by Henry M. Cowles
3. Attending to the Birds: Ornithologists and Listening, by Alexandra Hui
4. Attention, Art, and Psychotherapeutics, by Julian Chehirian
Part II. Philosophies of Attention5. Attention: Mechanism and Virtue, by Carlos Montemayor
6. Attention, Technology, and Creativity, by Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Shadab Tabatabaeian
7. Attention to Absence and Imagination, by Jonardon Ganeri
8. Dispatch from the Jhāna Wars: Attention Practice in Online Buddhism, by John Tresch
Part III. Attention, Technology, Culture9. Wearable Attention: Course-Correction for Wandering Minds, by Natasha Dow Schüll
10. Attentional ‘Ownership’: Online Education and Self-Possession, by Brian Yuan
11. Attention is All You Need: Humans and Computers in the Time of Neural Networks
Nick Seaver
12. Medium Focus, by Joanna Fiduccia
Part IV. Endgame(s)13. Attention Fast, Attention Slow: Obsession, Compulsion, Holding Close, by Yael Geller
14. Units of Intensive Care: Poetic Attention and the Precarious Body, by Lucy Alford
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
