Capturing Public Attention: Why agenda setting and collective attention matter for democracy

Public attention matters for democracy. We the people can only organize to demand social change, if our shared problems and challenges are visible to all of us. We can only hold politicians accountable, if we all pay attention to their behaviour and notice when they abuse their power.

But the headlines today are often dominated by celebrity scandal and inconsequential issues of the culture wars. Expert warnings about environmental destruction and climate change are drowned out by influencers and conspiracy theorists with large online followings. The voice of marginalized communities is often kept out of mainstream public discourse and struggle to get a fair hearing in the public sphere.

Yet public attention is limited: we as a democratic public cannot pay attention to all issues and all voices all the time. This raises the question: what deserves public attention and who should get a say in deciding this? Only once this fundamental question is answered, can we think in a systematic way about the role of media, state, and civil society in shaping public attention in our democracies.

In this conversation, political philosophers Katharine Browne, Zsolt Kapelner, Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl explore how democratic societies ought to determine their priorities and why public attention has become one of the defining political questions of our time. Drawing on recent work in political philosophy and democratic theory, they examine who has the power to shape our common agenda, whose concerns remain unheard, and what more inclusive and democratic forms of agenda setting might look like.

If you are interested, you can read the following writings by the panelists:

· Hvem får sette agendaen? av Zsolt Kapelner og Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl. Medier24 · ‘Flooding the zone’ and the politics of attention. Justice Everywhere blog. 

· Formuesskatten har fått langt meir merksemd enn den fortener av Zsolt Kapelner og Eirik Tangeraas Lygre. Altinget.no 

· Det nye oppmerksomhetstyranniet av Sebastian Watzl og Zsolt Kapelner. Klassekampen

For academic articles see:

· Katharine Browne and Sebastian Watz: The attention market—and what is wrong with it. Philosophical Studies 

· Zsolt Kapelner: The ethics of agenda setting. Synthese 

Litteraturhuset 27.10.26, kl. 1830 - 2000, Sal: Wergeland

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Watch live

Can't make it to Litteraturhuset? The panel discussion Capturing Public Attention will be livestreamed on Tuesday, 27 October, from 18:30 to 20:00.

Watch the livestream on Vimeo