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What is Attention Studies?

My experience is what I agree to attend to’, wrote the late nineteenth-century psychologist and philosopher William James. Following his lead we take attention as our object of study in order to better understand how we actively shape our experience of the world and, at the same time, how our experience shapes us; our ultimate goal being to enable more self-aware choices around modes of attention that enable us to become empowered citizens, harnessing more fully our potential to enhance our experience of modern life.

Attention Studies is the name we are giving to this new field of research, which brings researchers together from across the full breadth of scholarly practices to forge a new interdisciplinary ‘discipline’.

Drawing together colleagues from the Arts and Humanities, Psychology and Psychiatry, Nursing, Social Sciences, Business Studies, and Policy, Attention Studies aims not only institute a new field but also to find new ways of working and new interdisciplinary infrastructures that can support ambitious interventions into the fundamental challenges of the contemporary world.

Why Attention Studies?

We are living in what is defined by many as an attention warzone, in which attention has become a valuable commodity to be fought over. The recent commodification of our attention through ever-present digital media and app culture makes it easy to see why many now consider this a high stakes conflict with profound consequences: it has been credited with leading to nothing less than the destruction of democracy; the ‘attention economy’ has been roundly condemned as exploitative; and we regularly hear concerns about the ability of a generation who grew up with the micro-blog to attend to longer, slower, forms of culture that might encourage more nuanced and sophisticated thinking. On the health side, it’s notable that the tension between the attentional discipline required for academic and vocational success and the pull of unlimited distractions of modern media has focussed key questions of mental health with new intensity.

Yet this relentlessly dystopian vision tends to ignore both the new attentional possibilities the current environment brings, and a history in which the threat to attention posed by new technologis has long been a central feature of modernity. How can we work with our current environment of digital distraction to harness its creative potential, and to turn it to the benefit of our citizens and our societies? What can we learn from previous eras of panic about the effect of new technology on attention? And how do we want to shape the relationship between technology and attention over the next decade? The current dystopian vision can be challenged by working with the grain of this new environment, taking control to shape the potential it offers for individuals and society – but we can only achieve this kind of impact by bringing together expertise currently scattered across the disciplines. It is this commitment to working towards better ways of living that motivates our work. Bringing ‘Attention Studies’ into being as a rich new multi- and inter-disciplinary field–through a global network based at King’s College London–we hope to better address some of the key challenges of our age.