The Politics of Curiosity

Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy.

Autorentext

Enrico Campo is a research fellow of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan, Italy. His research interests include sociological theory, sociology of knowledge and the study of the relations among culture, technology and cognition. He is the author of Attention and its Crisis in Digital Society (Routledge, 2022), and co-editor of Exploring the Crisis. Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Investigations (2015).

Yves Citton is Professor of Literature and Media at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, France. His work explores the political imagination of Western modernity through dialogue between Enlightenment texts and contemporary political philosophy. He is author of Mediarchy (2019) and The Ecology of Attention (2016) and co-editor of the French journal Multitudes. His website is www.yvescitton.net and includes numerous open-access articles.

Inhalt

Introduction Attention, Distraction and Curiosity: Remantling our Mental Infrastructures 1. Quick Bites: Short-Form Attention in the Era of Platform Capitalism 2. The Socio-Cognitive Politics of Curiosity and Attention 3. On the Historical Co-Construction of "Good" Attention and "Bad" Curiosity 4. Two Attacks on Attention 5. A Writing Workshop: Arts of Joint Attention, Curiosity and Care in University 6. Curiosity among the Ruins of Homo Faber: Infrastructural Capitalism and the Politics of Care 7. The Drift of Attention Regimes in the Age of Digital Platforms: When Curiosity Was Taken Over by Reputation 8. The Digital Market of Interests and Feelings **9. Distraction and its Doppelgangers 10. Art and the Power of Distraction: Bergson, Benjamin, and Simone Weil 11. Curious Entities of Attentive Distraction 12. From the Economy of Attention to the Politics of Curiosity 13. Platforms of Curiosities: Weird Ways of Publishing Movies 14. Tribulations of Curiosity 15. On the Variety of Attentional Practices Postlude 16. Sticking with Speculation: A Practice in Noticing Attention