Faculty First Year Seminars 191LEG03 - Attention Activism

We all feel it? the siren call of screens; the fracturing of our attentions, the intrusion of Big Tech into what once were the innermost sanctums of the human experience. Our attention has been transformed into a monetized asset in what some scholars call our age of ?surveillance capitalism.? The more human behavioral data these companies collect, the savvier they become at designing devices and algorithms that capture and train our attention. In this course, we?ll consider how the ?attention crisis? impacts our democracy, our minds, our capacity to think, and our connections to each other. And we?ll learn what can be done to push back? from laws that could restrain a rising techno-oligarchy to quiet acts of citizen resistance. We?ll treat our classroom as a laboratory for experiments in individual and collective forms of attention that re-invigorate our sense of curiosity, autonomy, and agency.

First-year (R1ST)