32612
Seminar
SoSe 18: Theories of Attention
Ulla Haselstein Harald Wenzel
Comments
Attention is a scarce good – and whoever can steer it, whether by pointing with an index finger to something significant or by gluing us to a screen, can redefine communication and culture or even dominate our personal desires.
This course attempts a theoretical and historical inquiry into attention – triggered by the most recent social media’s capture and exploitation of it and its traces. That implies a look at its roots in perception and in shared intentionality, at its social, cultural and philosophical, but also at its emotional, neural and physiological bases, at its anchorage in modern media systems, its hidden mechanisms, its addictive potential. We will look at modernist art and literature as based on contemporaneous psychological research on attention, which created the new aesthetic concept of defamiliarization that in turn became the foundation for fashion and advertizing campaigns.
Big Data mining, micro-targeting and the bombardment with granular messages we have already made attention the raw material of a new stage of capitalist reproduction - we have already entered a new stage of alienation. Is there any escape?
Recommended literature:
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896], New York 1991: Zone Books.
Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, München 1998: Carl Hanser
Michael Harris, The End of Absence. Reclaiming What We Have Lost in a World of Constant Connection, New York 2014: Penguin
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13 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Thu, 2018-04-19 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-04-26 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-05-03 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-05-17 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-05-24 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-05-31 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-06-07 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-06-14 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-06-21 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-06-28 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-07-05 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-07-12 14:00 - 16:00
Thu, 2018-07-19 14:00 - 16:00