Paying Attention

Readings
Introducing Attention
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Hyper and Deep Attention” 

Clark, Andy. “Where are We?” (from Natural-Born Cyborgs) 

McCullough, Malcolm. “Attention” (from Ambient Commons) 

Ingold, Tim. “Education and Attention” (from The Life of Lines) 

James, William. “Attention” (from The Principles of Psychology) 

Mole, Christopher. “Highlights of a Difficult History” (from Attention is Cognitive Unison) 

Solnit, Rebecca. “The Mind at Three Miles an Hour” (from Wanderlust)

Economies of Attention
Spencer, Herbert. The Philosophy of Style (Selection) 

Simon, Herbert. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”

Terranova, Tiziana. “Attention, Economy and the Brain” 

Beller, Jonathan. “Paying Attention”

Lanham, Richard. ”Attention Economists" (from Economics of Attention) 

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Temporality and Cognitive Assemblages” (from Unthought) 

Cronin, Michael. “Reading the Signs”
Wise, J. Macgregor. “Attention and Assemblage in the Clickable World”

Wellmon, Chad. “79 Theses on Technology: On Attention”

Jacobs, Alan. “79 Theses on Technology: Jacobs Responds to Wellmon”
Paying Attention | Spring 2018 | 1
Amateur Attention
Horowitz, Alexandra. “Amateur Eyes” (from On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes) 

Stewart, Kathleen. “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World” 

Mattern, Shannon. “Cloud and Field”

Odell, Jenny. “Notes of a Bioregional Interloper” 

Popova, Maria. “Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium”

Benjamin, Walter. “The Flâneur” (from The Arcades Project)

Fuck Attention
Radiolab. “Stochasticity”

Benis, Matthew. “In Search of Distraction”

Sarton, Mary. “Canticle 6”

Dickinson, Emily. “One need not be a chamber to be haunted”
Stone, Linda. “Continuous Partial Attention”

Goldsmith, Kenneth. “Let’s Get Lost” (from Wasting Time on the Internet)

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “Reading, Writing, and Boredom” (from Boredom)

Read, Jason, “Distracted by Attention”

Farman, Jason. “Fidget Spinners: How Buffer Icons Have Shaped Our Sense of Time”

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Nonconscious Cognitions” (from Unthought) 

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Interplays between Nonconscious Cognition and Consciousness” (from Unthought)
Jennings, Carolyn Dicey. “I Attend, Therefore I Am”

Eno, Brian. “Ambient Music”

Political Attention
Solnit, Rebecca. “Citizens of the Streets” (from Wanderlust) 

Pedwell, Carolyn. “Mediated Habits: Images, Networked Affect and Social Change” 

Easterling, Keller. “Dispositon” (from Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space) 

Johnstone, Henry. “Rhetoric as a Wedge: A Reformulation” 

Dreher, Rod. “Thinking Clearly with Alan Jacobs”
Mol, Annemarie. “Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions”

Urban Attention
Mattern, Shannon. “Infrastructural Tourism”

Vanderbilt, Tom. “Our Eyes and Minds Betray us on the Road” (from Traffic) 

Powers, Martine. “Driving in Circles”

Manaugh, Geoff. “Crime is Just Another Way to Use the City” (from A Burglar’s Guide to the City) 

Clay, Grady. “Beats” (from Close-Up: How to Read the American City)

Milgrim, Stanley. “The Experience of Living in Cities” 

Paying Attention | Spring 2018 | 2
Horowitz, Alexandra. “The Fourth Dimension” (from On Looking) 

Radiolab. “Cities”

Nilsen, BJ. “Recording the City: Berlin, London, Naples” 

Burrington, Ingrid. “How to See Invisible Infrastructure”

Storied Attention
Ingold, Tim. “Stories Against Classification” (from Being Alive) 

Gallop, Jane. “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters” 

Sedgwick, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” 

Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living” 

Collins, Billy. “Introduction to Poetry”

Racialized Attention
Bouie, Jamelle. “Michael Brown Wasn’t a Superhuman Demon”

Baldwin, James. “The Negro in American Culture” 

Rankin, Claudia. Citizen (selection)
Cadogan, Garnette. “Walking While Black”

Breland, Ali. “How White Engineers Built Racist Code and Why it’s Dangerous for Black People”

Cosmides, Leda Et al. “Perceptions of Race” 

MacLin, Otto H. Et al. “Race, Arousal, Attention, Exposure, and Delay”

Networked Attention
Pigg, Stacey. “Distracted by Digital Writing: Unruly Bodies and the Schooling of Literacy” 

Morozov, Evgeny. “The Death of the Cyberflâneur”

Harris, Malcolm. “Behavior Modification” (from Kids These Days) 

Pettman, Dominic. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Tweets” (from Infinite Distraction) 

Alang, Navneet. “Close Reading: The Subtext of an Image Feed is Warmth”

Kay, Alan and Adele Goldberg. “Personal Dynamic Media” 

Wu, Tim. “The Crisis of Attention Theft: Ads that Steal Your Time for Nothing in Return”

Embodied Attention
Shanahan, Charif. “Ligament”
Wilkerson, Abby. “Embodiment” 

Horowitz, Alexandra. “Seeing; Not Seeing” (from On Looking) 

Latour, Bruno. “How to Talk About the Body?”

Rose, Mike. “The Working Life of a Waitress” 

Hendren, Sara. “All Technology is Assistive”

McCullough, Malcolm. “Embodiment” (from Ambient Commons) 


Paying Attention | Spring 2018 | 3

Solnit, Rebecca. “Walking After Midnight” (from Wanderlust) 

Hendren, Sara. “The White Cane as Technology”

Nonhuman Attention
Burke, Kenneth. “All Living Things Are Critics” 

Horowitz, Alexandra. “A Dog’s-Nose View” (from On Looking) 

Johnston, Devin. “Crows in Winter” (from Creaturely) 

Johnston, Devin. “Murmurations” (from Creaturely) 

Johnston, Devin. “Creaturely” (from Creaturely) 

Jones, Kate E. “Sonic Ecology: The Undetectable Sounds of the City” 

Bruyninckx, Joeri. “Silent City: Listening to Birds in Urban Nature” 

Pezzullo, Phaedra. “Tourist Itineraries” (from Toxic Tourism)

Intuitive Attention
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Intuition, Cognitive Assemblages, and Politico-Historico Affects” (from Unthought) 

Liggins, Saundra. “The Urban Gothic Vision of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist
Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist
Sousanis, Nick. “The Importance of Seeing Double and Then Some” (from Unflattening)
Berry, Lynda. “When Images Come to Us”

Guide Books
Each student will choose one of these to review and present on in class explicating the features of each and
exploring how they might be imitated or otherwise employed.
• Hayes, Brian. Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
• Burrington, Ingrid. Networks of New York
• MacNaughton, Wendy. Meanwhile in San Francisco
• Los Angeles Urban Rangers. Field Guide to the American Road Trip
• The Arsenal of Exclusion and Inclusion
• Ascher, Kate. The Works
• Pater, Rubin. Drone Survival Guide: Twenty-First-Century Birdwatching
• The Sibley Guide to Birds
• Reid, Fiona. Peterson Field Guide to Mammals of North America
• National Geographic Pocket Guide to Insects of North America
• Nelson, Gil, Christopher J. Earle, Richard Spellenberg & David More. Trees of Eastern North America
• Hayden, Dolores. A Field Guide to Sprawl
• Cannon, Craig & Tim Hwang. The Container Guide
• Horne, Emily & Tim Maly. The Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance

Paying Attention | Spring 2018 | 4