Description du projet
La bataille pour notre attention
Les gens ordinaires utilisent aujourd’hui plus que jamais les technologies numériques, sont constamment à l’affût des dernières actualités, envoyant et recevant des messages et traquant les bonnes affaires sur leur smartphone. Alors que les grandes entreprises technologiques vendent les données de leurs utilisateurs aux annonceurs, les gouvernements modifient rapidement la sphère publique grâce à des analyses et à des interfaces numériques basées sur des données. Dans cette nouvelle économie des données politiques, notre attention est devenue une ressource limitée que les annonceurs, les politiciens et les programmeurs de logiciels cherchent à attirer. En combinant des méthodes des sciences sociales classiques avec des techniques de science des données, le projet DISTRACT financé par l’UE réunit une équipe interdisciplinaire pour examiner les dimensions mentales, sociales et matérielles de l’attention et ses distractions à l’ère numérique. Les recherches seront menées au Danemark, le pays le plus numérisé d’Europe.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
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Régime de financement
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitution d’accueil
1165 Kobenhavn
Danemark