POL 261
Politics of Attention · 4 credits · Spring 2027
Requirements
Prerequisite: Any Social Science Course
About this course
We live in an age where our capacity to focus and pay attention has become the target of a digitized capitalism that has commodified our gaze and attempted to colonize our desires and dreams. This class is both an attempt to more fully understand the political and cultural implications of this attention economy and an attempt to regain some of our ability to concentrate. Each weekly class will be four hours long which will include two hours of us sitting together and reading in silence. Topics and ideas to be covered will include capitalist automation, the ecology of attention, alienation and fetishism, speed and everyday life, the status of images and spectacle in our cultures, our 'leisure time' and amusement as productive labor, platform capitalism and monopoly rents, and the loss of the ability to create.
Seat status as of Oct 3, 4:22 AM ET. Seats can change between refreshes.
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