Vision, Attention and Extractive Capitalism
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Requested lectures |
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| Description | The lecture took place in the Visual Anthropology/Visual Culture course at the Faculty of Social Studies under the invitation of Paride Bollettin (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Science, Department of Anthropology). The session introduced students to the topics of the historicity of vision, the visual regimes of the classical age and modernity, and the complex interplay between institutions, scientific knowledge, social relations and visual apparatus from a historical epistemology perspective. The lecture consisted of three chapters: 1. The historicity of vision; 2. Industrial capitalism and the crisis of attention; and 3. Internet 2.0 and the attention economy. Leaning on the work of authors such as Jonathan Crary, Bernard Stiegler, and Tiziana Terranova, the presentation aimed to show how the mutations introduced since modernity in the status of the observer are related to the emergence of industrial capitalism and how the 'crisis of attention' linked to the modern subject of vision reoccurs and exacerbates in the attention economy of the Internet 2.0. The lesson referred to some comic works that address the idiosyncrasies arising from the attention economy from a personal perspective (Zerocalcare, 2013) in order to engage students, and ended with a round of discussion on the issues presented, guided by a short questionnaire. |
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