Comments on: Weekending 09122010 https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2010/09/13/weekending-09122010/ Clarify Today, Design Tomorrow Fri, 18 Aug 2017 17:58:55 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.1 By: Julian https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2010/09/13/weekending-09122010/#comment-607 Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:43:16 +0000 http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/?p=4739#comment-607 Thanks for the pointers, Sam. I keep coming back to the Crary from when I first read it while working in a Virtual Reality lab at UW back in the day. I’m fascinated by its continuing relevance. This idea of attention is also intriguing; I’m actually interested in attention from a very pragmatic perspective — the draw of the screen and feeds and notifications and all that. What can design do to mitigate the ham-fisted ways in which we’re drawn in to continue to be attentive to everything going on around the expanding, circulating maelstrom of events/activities/updates that I think are driven by this attention economy.

]]> By: Sam Kinsley https://blog.nearfuturelaboratory.com/2010/09/13/weekending-09122010/#comment-606 Tue, 14 Sep 2010 14:14:11 +0000 http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/?p=4739#comment-606 It is interesting that you’re reading Crary’s excellent “Techniques of the Observer” with a view to engaging with ‘augmented reality’. This kind of ties in to some things that we’ve been addressing in recent research activities. I think there is an issue of how we understand ‘attention’ which is important here, as Crary suggests:

19th century optical devices[…] involved arrangements of bodies in space, which codified and normalised the observer within rigidly defined systems of visual consumption. they were techniques for the management of attention, for imposing homogeneity[…] (Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 18)

This raises cultural, economic and political issues about the codification and commodification of attention. As Crary notes from his reading of Foucault, it is in the codification and normalisation of attention that the human subject becomes an object of observation. Just as we can ask questions of the ways in which social networking sites channel attention based upon user data etc. we might also question the ways in which AR might similarly operate.

[PLUG] This was addressed in interesting ways in a recent conference “Paying Attention”:

http://payingattention.org/

which was convened by the Digital Cultures Research Centre, in Bristol (UK) http://www.dcrc.org.uk/

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