Attention and Modernity: Mind, Media and the Senses, 1500-2050

The last two decades have seen the rise of an extraordinary new attention economy-- a pervasive, technologically-mediated "fracking" of human beings for the money-value of their eyeballs. This dramatic commodification of human attention is transforming social relations, political life, and the experience of personhood. This course (anchored in the history of science, but reaching into theology, media theory, psychology, and philosophy) stretches back from our current predicament, to uncover the deep genealogy of this most intimate feature of human being. What is attention? And how can richer understanding of this question change the world?