About the Lecture
How do you know if someone is paying attention? In settings like the driver's seat of a "self-driving" car, the work-from-home office, the streaming music service, or the lecture hall, attention is known and managed through technical mediations that are inevitably vulnerable to manipulation. This talk examines techniques for not paying attention—from steering wheel weights to mouse jigglers—as a way to understand how attention is constructed today. These deceptive interventions into the technicity of attention help to clarify the array of social and technical relations from which attention emerges and raise new questions about the functioning of the attention economy more generally.
About the Speaker
Nick Seaver is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program in Science, Technology & Society. His research examines the relationship between cultural concepts and technological practices. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (2022). He is currently writing a book on the meaning and measurement of attention and developing a project on the anthropology of contraptions.