ATTENTION AND DEMOCRACY [ONLINE] (1/3)

"ATTENTION AND DEMOCRACY [ONLINE] (1/3)" is the first session of a virtual seminar course on Zoom held on Tuesday evenings from October 20 to November 3. It is led by Mihir Kshirsagar, Princeton technology policy clinic director and former lead trial counsel for the New York Attorney General, and run by the Strother School of Radical Attention at 55 Washington Street in New York City. The course considers the direct relationship between Attention Activism and democracy, drawing on the work of John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Danielle Allen, and others. It asks what forms of attention make healthy politics possible, what role Attention Activism plays in the effort to salvage democracy, and how everyday people can join the effort, arguing that human fracking—the fracturing and monetizing of collective attention—threatens democratic politics and that repairing our capacity for collective attention is needed to rebuild political institutions.