A compelling and essential collection of innovative and urgent explorations of the intertwined problems of attention, distraction and curiosity
Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA and author of Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (1999)
This exciting volume brings together scholars, artists, and critics from a wide gamut of fields, with a diverse array of interests and approaches. Together, collaboratively, they reveal to us the surprising depths of the theoretical problem of attention, as also the alarming depth of the current political and economic crisis of attention. This book is bound to change the way we navigate these depths, and may even help us, if we pay it the attention it deserves, to find a way out of the crisis.
Justin Smith-Ruiu, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Université Paris Cité, France and co-editor of Scenes of Attention (2023)
"This edited, interdisciplinary collection aims to reframe the attention economy and identify alternatives to it by exploring the connections between attention, distraction, and curiosity and examining the mental infrastructures conditioned by acquired habits, technical networks, sociopolitical institutions, and cultural schemas (p. 1). Fifteen chapters grouped into sections titled Critical Views on Attention, Digital Mental Infrastructures, Praises of Distraction, and Promises of Curiosities address aspects of these aims from a variety of disciplinary viewpoints but ultimately lack cohesion. There is no unifying conclusion; the postlude is a practice in noticing attention that invites readers to take part in an exercise to explore their own attention and curiosity. While researchers and scholars may find selections from this volume useful, the writing is often dense and inaccessible to those newly exploring the topic."
L. Skaggs, Illinois State University, CHOICE
