Cultures of attention: the politics of affect in C21st media

Description

In the C21st, Mark B.N. Hansen describes, media is no longer something we choose to consume but something that has become an inescapable part of our experience of the world. Beginning from this premise, this project explores how affect is therefore increasingly part of the infrastructure of everyday life in the West. It aims to understand how affect is produced and circulated in deeply interconnected accumulations of sounds, images, devices, ideas, bodily capacities, networks, platforms and algorithms. Specifically, the project aims to construct a theoretical framework for understanding the ways in which these new conditions of human experience shape cultures of attention, a phrase designed to capture the fact that the traditional language of human choice and individual decision-making is inadequate for understanding the ideas and events we pay attention to in the world today. Through a series of digital ethnographic analyses of everyday forms of media engagement, the project aims to shed light on how contemporary media work by modulating affect and therefore shaping attention, in ways that have political implications. In doing so, the project will create important new knowledge on social scientific concepts of affect and attention as well as on the broader cultural and political implications of today’s pervasively mediated worlds.