Descrizione del progetto
La battaglia per la nostra attenzione
Oggi, una persona media utilizza le tecnologie digitali più che mai, guardando costantemente le notizie, inviando e ricevendo messaggi e seguendo le offerte sugli smartphone. Mentre le grandi aziende tecnologiche vendono i dati degli utenti agli inserzionisti, i governi stanno rapidamente cambiando la sfera pubblica attraverso l’analisi dei dati e le interfacce digitali. In questa nuova economia politica dei dati, la nostra attenzione è diventata una risorsa limitata contesa da inserzionisti, politici e programmatori di software. Combinando i metodi classici delle scienze sociali con le tecniche della scienza dei dati, il progetto DISTRACT, finanziato dall’UE, riunisce un gruppo di ricerca interdisciplinare per esaminare le dimensioni mentali, sociali e materiali dell’attenzione e della distrazione nell’era digitale. La ricerca sarà condotta in Danimarca, il paese più digitalizzato d’Europa.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantIstituzione ospitante
1165 Kobenhavn
Danimarca