Really looking forward to reading Tiziana Terranova’s ‘Attention, Economy and the Brain’ in the latest issue of Culture Machine (see link below). It looks at Tarde and the brain, and makes references to neuroscience, as do some of the posts on this blog and the latter part of Virality. This is in fact great timing as I’m currently developing new material on neuroculture and subjectification for a future book project! Some more posts will follow on this article…

CULTURE MACHINE 13 (2012)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current

PAYING ATTENTION
edited by Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley

How are the ways we understand subjective experience – not least
cognitively – being modulated by political economic rationales? And how
might artists, cultural theorists, social scientists and radical
philosophers learn to respond – analytically, creatively,
methodologically and politically – to the commodification of human
capacities of attention? This special issue of Culture Machine explores
these interlinked questions as a way of building upon and opening out
contemporary research concerning the economisation of cognitive
capacities. It proposes a contemporary critical re-focussing on the
politics, ethics and aesthetics of the ‘attention economy’, a notion
developed in the 1990s by scholars such as Jonathan Beller, Michael
Goldhaber and Georg Franck.

Contents

Patrick Crogan, Samuel Kinsley, ‘Paying Attention: Towards a Critique of
the Attention Economy’

Bernard Stiegler, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon’

Tiziana Terranova, ‘Attention, Economy and the Brain’

Jonathan Beller, ‘Wagers Within the Image: Rise of Visuality,
Transformation of Labour, Aesthetic Regimes’

Samuel Kinsley, ‘Towards Peer-to-Peer Alternatives: An Interview with
Michel Bauwens’

Sy Taffel, ‘Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Materiality and
Ecological Cost’

Ben Roberts, ‘Attention-seeking: Technics, Publics and Software
Individuation’

Taina Bucher, ‘A Technicity of Attention: How Software “Makes Sense”’

Martyn Thayne, ‘Friends Like Mine: The Production of Socialised
Subjectivity in the Attention Economy’

Rolien Hoyng, ‘Popping Up and Fading Out: Participatory Networks and
Istanbul’s Creative City Project’

Bjarke Liboriussen, ‘Second Life: Message (to Professionals), Attention!
Economic Bubble (to the Rest of Us)’

Bjarke Liboriussen, Ursula Plesner, ‘Current Architectural Use of
Virtual Worlds’

Ruth Catlow, ‘We Won’t Fly for Art: Media Art Ecologies’

Constance Fleuriot, ‘Avoiding Vapour Trails in the Virtual Cloud:
Developing Ethical Design Questions for Pervasive Media Producers’