Descripción del proyecto
La batalla para captar nuestra atención
La persona media en la actualidad usa las tecnologías digitales más que nunca, y constantemente sigue noticias, envía y recibe mensajes, y está al tanto de ofertas en su teléfono inteligente. Mientras que las grandes empresas tecnológicas venden los datos personales de sus usuarios a los anunciantes, los gobiernos cambian rápidamente la esfera pública mediante analíticas basadas en datos e interfaces digitales. En esta nueva economía de datos políticos, nuestras atención se ha convertido en un recurso limitado codiciado por anunciantes, políticos y programadores de «software». Mediante la combinación de los métodos clásicos de las ciencias sociales con las técnicas de la ciencia de datos, el proyecto financiado con fondos europeos DISTRACT reúne a un equipo interdisciplinar para examinar las dimensiones mentales, sociales y materiales de la atención y su distracción en la era digital. La investigación se realizará en Dinamarca, el país más digitalizado de Europa.
Objetivo
Bridging anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, political science, and data science, DISTRACT combines advanced data science tools and established social science analysis to explore a pressing challenge: the ever more alluring distractions of human attention in the age of smartphones and other digitized technologies. DISTRACT departs from five linked hypotheses: 1) The attention is commonly (by scholars and laymen) seen as finite; ⇒ (2) As such, it is a scarce resource that is subject to competition and regulation; ⇒ 3) This is not new but it is acquiring unseen urgency in the current data economy; ⇒ 4) An interdisciplinary social data science approach allows for solid and novel investigation of this unmet scientific and societal need; and ⇒ 5) As the world’s most digitized country (and homogeneous population and state-of-the-art public databases), Denmark is an ideal site to study this political economy of distraction. Combining qualitative and quantitative data from four case studies, DISTRACT thus aims to trace and analyse the mental, social and material techniques by which attention is captured, retained and deflected in digitized Denmark. Analytically, we distinguish between three layers in which attention is managed and manipulated: a “mental”, “social” and “material” dimension. We also differentiate between three components of given attention/distraction sequence: the ‘”capturing”, “retention” and “deflection” phase. Empirically, case-studies shall be carried out of (a) national politics, (b) the tech business, (c) “off-the-grid” alternative communities, and (d) education and workplace environments. Data shall be collected, integrated and analysed via a combination of 1) qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis; (2) quantitative methods, including natural experiments and predictive models; and (3) quali-quantitative methods including web scraping and supervised machine learning.
Ámbito científico
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Régimen de financiación
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitución de acogida
1165 Kobenhavn
Dinamarca