Module C: Historical perspective – Attention

This section analyses how different knowledge technologies impact people’s attention and, consequently, their decisions regarding which information is worth storing and remembering, and which is instead forgotten or not even registered in the first place. We address two key issues: the problem of information overload and how it shapes knowledge infrastructures as well as individuals’ engagement with knowledge, and the issue of affective contents and how they direct and sometimes skew people’s attention. Following the analysis proposed in Module A, we focus on attention understood as the “ability to decide what to want.”