Dr. Galit Wellner
Tel Aviv University, Israel
Fellow am CAIS von August bis September 2021
Tel Aviv University, Israel
Fellow am CAIS von August bis September 2021
Attention in the digital age is often regarded as a scarce resource. The common response to hyper-capitalism calls for a specific mode of attention namely focusing. I offer a radically different solution that is based on a genealogy of the notion of attention. The genealogy demonstrates how attention has been co-shaped by and with media technologies, such as television and cellphones. Multi-attention means that our attention can be directed to more than a single object at a given point in time, in various degrees. My notion of multi-attention can answer the internet’s attention economy, i.e., some attentions can be paid to the advertisements while the rest can be invested in the desired contents. Multi-attention is a feminist practice and hence did not gain the compliments usually given to (male) pilots‘ or day-traders‘ multitasking.