The Fifties in 3D, from the National Archives UK
A new special issue of Culture Machine, in which I have an article, has been published. It is a special issue on the topic of ‘Paying Attention’ collecting papers given at the ESF conference of the same name in Sweden in 2010. As the editors of the issue, Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsey, put it:
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?
My own article is called ‘Attention-seeking: Technics, Publics and Software Individuation’ and is basically concerned with arguing against the usefulness of the concept of ‘attention economy’ as a way of understanding free software communities. It also looks critically at Christopher Kelty’s concept of the recursive public, as articulated in Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software .