ALGOtalk #2: Nick Seaver
Hosted by the ALGOFOLK and AI STORIES projects, Nick Seaver (Tufts University) will give a talk titled "How to Not Pay Attention", in which he presents his most recent research on the sociotechnical construction of attention.
Main content
Nick Seaver is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Tufts University, where he studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. The TMS-funded ALGOFOLK and the ERC-funded AI STORIES projects invite him to give a talk titled: "How to Not Pay Attention".
Abstract:
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 proxies that are inevitably vulnerable to manipulation. This talk examines techniques for not paying attention—for fooling a variety of attention measurement devices—as a way to understand how attention is constructed today. These deceptive interventions into what Taina Bucher calls the “technicity of attention” help to clarify the array of social and technical relations from which attention emerges.
This talk will be in English.
