In this talk, Princeton historian of science D. Graham Burnett will discuss the shifting technological and phenomenological history of human attention, in an effort to shed light on the watershed character of our moment. Moving from the collectively authored “manifesto of the attention liberation movement,” Attensity! (the work of the international “Friends of Attention” coalition), Burnett will outline the principles of a rising commitment to Attention Activism across a widening spectrum of artists, teachers, students, and citizens. What is the relationship between the freedom of attention and the liberal arts tradition? How can attentional habits and practices be understood to undergird deliberative democracy? In what ways can colleges and universities serve as “sanctuaries” for the human uses of human attention, particularly as we confront the power, promise, and peril of AI? Addressing these questions, Burnett will invite the audience to think forward to a world in which human attention defies the operations of “human fracking” by big tech.
D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. A historian of science, writer, and editor, he was a 2013–2014 Guggenheim Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center and a recipient of a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. He has also held fellowships at Columbia University and the New York Public Library and has been involved with the History of Cartography Project. Burnett is the author of four books, including Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature, winner of the Hermalyn Prize in Urban History and the New York City Book Award, and The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Economist, the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. He is an editor at Cabinet and serves on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly.
