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Public discussion of ethical and political issues about attention and distraction has tended to be about topics that go under the heading of “attention economy,” i.e., social media, modern technology, psychological health, data privacy and the influence of large tech companies. In this workshop we aim to bring into focus the use of the directing and diverting of attention by political actors: in international conflict, in policy making, in political campaigns, and in social and political coordination, both at a national and at an international level. We contend that this new angle focused on the topic of attention in the political sphere helps to better understand a range of policies and conflicts. In the workshop, we aim to highlight important examples of the use of attention and diversion in conflict and politics, and we will collect perspectives from relevant fields on those issues. Moving forward, we aim to subject those strategies to an ethical analysis regarding issues about political legitimacy, justice, or democratic freedom.
We hypothesize that the issue of attention policies helps connect, integrate, and better understand a wide variety of political tools. For example:
- Using attention capture through sirens, parades and rallies, statues or iconography.
- Using and coordinating attention for large-scale social projects and social cooperation (i.e. working to achieve joint attention on city-, state-, and nation-wide scales). Examples would be messaging to direct attention to the safety of vaccination, or diverting attention away from cultural war issues.
- Using media for the social coordination of attention through music, radio (think about the distribution of the “Volksempfänger” in the Third Reich), film, and, of course, now, smartphones, computers, and tablets.
- The role of attention in demagoguery, disinformation, and political propaganda, e.g. in the service of aligning and coordinating the attention of individuals, by generating outrage, or by diverting attention from other issues.
- International campaigns that use attention to generate or calm political conflicts, e.g. directing the attention of populations in Muslim countries either away from or toward Jihadist messages.
- National and international campaigns whose aim is better understood as attention policy (e.g. attention getters or distractors) rather than as substantial proposals or actions.
- Using nudging techniques to attract attention to options favorable for the public good.
- Campaigns to ‘flood the zone’ with anything from fake news to minor and major scandals designed mostly to exhaust the public’s attention to politics, and thus create space for achieving unpopular aims ‘under the attentional radar’.
With this workshop we will, for the first time, bring the topic of attention policies into focus with these and other examples.
Program (titles and abstracts will be published soon)
Thursday, March 9th
9:00-9:30 Katharine Browne (philosophy, University of Oslo) Sebastian Watzl (philosophy, University of Oslo) Greg Reichberg (philosophy, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)) and Ilaria Carrozza (international relations, PRIO): “Welcome & Introduction”
9:30-10:00 Sebastian Watzl (philosophy, University of Oslo)
10:00-11:20 Ty Solomon (international relations, University of Glasgow)
11:20- 12:40 Hjalmar Bang Carlsen and August Lohse (sociology, computational political science, University of Copenhagen)
12:40 – 13:40 Lunch Break
13:40-15:00 Isabel Kaeslin (philosophy, University of Fribourg)
15:00-16:20 Michael Bang Petersen (psychology, political science, Aarhus University)
16:20-16:50 Coffee Break
16:50-18:10 Jason Stanley (philosophy, Yale University)
Friday, March 10th
9:30-10:50 Leonie Smith (philosophy, University of Manchester)
10:50-12:20 Samira Amini Hajibashi (psychology, PRIO)
12:20-13:20 Lunch Break
13:20-14:40 Kirsi Helkala (cyber security, mathematics, Norwegian Defense Cyber Academy)
14:40-16:00 Todd Hall (international relations, University of Oxford)
16:00-16:30 Coffee Break
16:30-17:50 Massimo Renzo (philosophy, politics, law, King’s College London)
17:50-18:30 Round Table Discussion
This workshop is organized by the Salient Solutions project. It involves a collaboration between IFIKK at the University of Oslo and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).
Sebastian Watzl, Why attention is a powerful (and dangerous) political tool
Abstract coming soon.
Ty Solomon, "Collective Affect, Public Moods, and Political Attention"
Political attention is intimately bound up with political affect. The old newspaper adage, “if it bleeds, it leads” implies an affective component to the intensities associated with mass attention. It is this affective dimension that this presentation aims to introduce to the workshop. The presentation builds upon the growing literature on emotions in International Relations (IR) and the social sciences over the past 15 years to suggest that political attention is intimately woven with affect. Specifically, collective moods are forms of political affect that shape the contours of public attention during times of crisis. Conceptualized as both individual and collective phenomena, moods make some issues more salient than others and predispose us to see the world in a certain fashion and to orient ourselves to it in certain ways. Political attention, it will be argued, is rooted in prior states of collective moods which orient attention itself.
Hjalmar Bang Carlsen and August Lohse, "Responsiveness through Social Media: Are politicians expressed priorities driven by social media feedback?"
Abstract coming soon.
Isabel Kaeslin, "Virtuous Collective Attention"
How can a collective pay attention virtuously? Imagine a group of scientists. It matters what topics they pay attention to, that is, which topics they take to be the relevant ones, and what they leave unnoticed in the background as irrelevant. If we want to understand not only how individuals pay attention virtuously, but also collectives, we first need a framework to talk about virtuous collective action.
This paper argues that we are bound to understand virtuous collective action in terms of the collective being institutionalized. At the same time, we have to think of the constituents of the collective in terms of practical identities (as opposed to individuals). This is what enables us to understand virtuous collective action in an Aristotelian virtue ethical framework.
It will be argued that collectives only have the required stability in their actions when their commitments are habitualized in the form of institutionalized procedures. An Aristotelian understanding of virtue distinguishes between commitment, inclination, and action . Only when a subject’s inclination is fully lined up with her commitment, do we arrive at the required stability (of action, of character) for virtuous action.
In the case of individuals, to build up an appropriate inclination consists in an inscribing of the commitment into the feelings and body of the subject. If a commitment is fully ‘embodied’ in this sense, it has formed the individual’s inclination accordingly. How can one make sense of this in the case of collective subjects?
This paper argues that for collectives, the embodiment of commitment (the forming of the fitting inclinations) consists in creating policies, procedures, and rules that ensure the acting according to the commitment, irrespective of the motivation of each individual involved in the collective. Hence, embodiment of commitment, in the case of collectives, is institutionalization. This framework then explores what this requirement of institutionalization means for virtuous collective attention.
Michael Bang Petersen, "Coordinating Attention in Times of Conflict"
Group-based conflict is one of the most cooperative of all human enterprises. A key part of this type of cooperation is the coordination of attention. Everyone needs to attend to the same problem at the same time and be ready to act in highly specific ways. In this talk, I will outline the involved psychology and explore its political implication for the election of leaders as well as the spread of information and misinformation during crises situations.
Jason Stanley, title coming soon.
Abstract coming soon.
Leonie Smith, "Collective Nostalgic Attention and Working-Class Political Recognition"
When collective, harmful, mis-directed attention is provided by middle-class actors toward a working-class past, this paper argues that it can constitute a harmful form of nostalgic attention, in which the past is rewritten in epistemically harmful ways. In the case of collective harmful nostalgic attention towards the industrial past, however, the harms are not only towards those who are misremembered, forgotten, or frozen in time, they are also towards present-day working-class actors: the social and political reality of both past and present is at stake. The result is an existential harm to individual members of the working-class present, and to the boundaries and scope of collective working-class identity. This, in turn, has negative repercussions for both working-class self-identification and for their epistemic and political agency, damaging the potential for class-based political representation, solidarity and resistance within contemporary democratic societies.
This might indicate that collective nostalgic attention is therefore inherently damaging with regard to present-day working-class identities and political recognition. However, while a focus on the past can (and often does) serve to make the present-day working-class less salient in contemporary democratic societies there are also reasons to think that, when directed appropriately, it can also be used to bolster present-day political identification and make the same group of people more politically relevant. There is therefore an opportunity for working-class ontological reality to be reclaimed and to serve as a basis for present-day political solidarity, action, and recognition in powerful ways.
This paper examines this practice of nostalgic attention with regard to the industrialised working-class past, outlines the political ramifications of nostalgic attention for present-day working-class political identification and solidarity, and asks what exactly it is that distinguishes this politically empowering nostalgic attention from that which silences and erases working-class political identity.
Samira Amini Hajibashi, "Cognitive neuroscience of fake news: The role of attention and individual differences"
“Fake news” is a relatively new term, but some have considered it one of the greatest threats to democracy and cognition security. But how does it work? Cognitive Neuroscience can provide some insight. In this talk, I will present the recent findings on how and why fake news work from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, focusing on the role of attention and individual differences. Moreover, since fake news, propaganda, and disinformation are strategies that are systematically used by autocratic regimes, I will highlight real examples of fake news designed by state-affiliated news agencies in Iran to visualize and better understand the range and potential consequences of attention policies.
Kirsi Helkala, "Sides of political attention in social media – Cybersecurity perspective"
All the time, we all are under influence of some kind both in the physical world as well as in the digital world. In my talk, I will discuss influencing on social media from the cybersecurity perspective. The context of this talk is political attention and the examples presented in the talk are from the political parties in Finland and Norway. The talk will have a specific focus on misinformation, disinformation and hate speech and give examples of the countermeasures that can be carried out by an organization and what an individual can do.
Todd Hall, "Who Cares? Emotion, Attention, and Politics"
In this talk I will explore the various ways emotions and attention can intersect with political implications. These include issues of how emotional responses can play a role in what captures political attention, whose emotions receive attention, and the key political importance of boring things.
Massimo Renzo, "Political manipulation and the problem of attention"
What is political manipulation? And why is it wrong? Many believe that political manipulation involves exercising some sort of deceptive or covert influence on the public. I will argue that this is not necessarily the case. Instead, I suggest that an adequate account of political manipulation will have to distinguish different ways in which our efforts to adequately respond to our reasons for action can be interfered with. Social media play an increasingly significant role in producing this sort of interference. They do so by controlling our attention. Understanding this process help us see the limits of the more traditional way of understanding political manipulation.