International Summer Course Navigates the Ethics of Attention
Are we paying enough attention? Are we paying too much attention? Are we paying attention to the right things?
Researchers in philosophy and related fields will gather this July 1–5 in Budapest, Hungary, to address these questions of today’s attention economy at the Ethics of Attention summer university course at Budapest’s Central European University (CEU).
Georgi Gardiner, associate professor in the UT Department of Philosophy, will co-direct the program with Cathy Mason, CEU Austria, and Ella Whiteley, University of Sheffield, England, with funding support from the Institute for Humane Studies and the Open Society University Network. They have enlisted an international, interdisciplinary faculty to host graduate students, postdocs, and other early career researchers in addressing the ins and outs of the contemporary attention span.
“Attention is really important,” said Gardiner. “We’ve gone through this information age where we suddenly have this incredible glut of information, and now we have to learn how to curate it. But also, our virtues of attention, our attentional well-being, are really important for people languishing online, especially young people.”
The epitome of this potential attention crisis is the ease in which users can click and flick between videos and topics on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
“What is that going to do to our brain over time? Will we have Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in 40 years’ time because we are lab rats in this big real-life experiment?” said Gardiner. “What happens to our attentional abilities in the future, given what’s happening to our attention right now?”
Gardiner’s own research considers the normativity of attention, asking what healthy attention should look like, from societal or personal viewpoints.
“Things like a newspaper that reports on crime committed by immigrants, but never crime committed by non-immigrants,” said Gardiner. “Maybe every single claim they make is true and well researched, but there’s some kind of dishonesty happening—that’s a deception of attention.”
Gardiner looks for frameworks that would guide attention theory in areas like media, journalism, art, and the ways we learn about the world and place value on the things we learn.
“In relationships, for example, we should be thinking about our partners more frequently than strangers,” said Gardiner. “And how to listen well seems like an attentional notion. There’s all these areas, and we don’t really have philosophy frameworks for thinking about the normativity of attention.”
The Ethics of Attention summer school aims to help build these frameworks. Participants will survey major theories of attention—within areas like Asian philosophy, analytic philosophy, and psychology—and apply these to real-life case studies involving technology, media and advertising, power dynamics, prejudice and bias, mental health, science research, and skepticism towards science.
Gardiner and fellow organizers see these discussions inspiring a lot more attention to attention.
“It’s an extremely rich and untapped area,” said Gardiner. “I think this could launch a lot of new research projects.”