ENGL 268 - Paying (for) Attention: Reading as Resistance to the Attention Economy

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)

Your English professor assigns that novel—the one that changed all literature after it. You’ve known about it for years and are eager to read it with others. Yes, you’re busy. Yes, it’s long. Still, you commit. But three pages in, a novel-related internet search leads to Wikipedia, then YouTube, then non-novel-related TikTok scrolling. You blame yourself for a lack of focus. But what if your distraction isn’t a personal failing, but a social problem instead? And a historically determined one at that. This intensive begins here. Together we co-create a “slow reading” syllabus that explores how social media, surveillance capitalism, and Big Data have ensnared us in an attention economy that monetizes our most precious resource: the time we have to pay attention. Possible texts might include writing by fictionists and poets (e.g. Ted Chiang, Wendell Berry, Ruth Ozeki), philosophers (Guy Debord, Arne Næss, Byung-Chul Han), art critics and media theorists (John Berger, Neil Postman, Dominic Pettman), and NYT best-selling technoskeptics (Jenny Odell, Jaron Lanier, Oliver Burkeman). We practice secular mindfulness in the Pratt House meditation room, try out analog tools to curb high-tech distraction, contemplate a “slow cinema” film (by Chantal Akerman, Lav Diaz, or Béla Tarr), keep hand-written journals during a multi-day “digital detox,” and take a not-so-silent hike in the Vassar Preserve while enacting “deep listening” (Pauline Oliveros). Throughout these experiments, we reframe our capacity for sustained attention from a mere study skill to a political act of resistance. Alden Sajor Marte-Wood.

First six-week course.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT