The event will take place on Thursday, May the 16th at 6pm in Pritličje, Mestni trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana

The event will be a series of short lectures presenting texts published in Maska 213-214: Pozornost/Attention (summer 2023) and upcoming texts for the supplement to the journal Javnost/The Public, which will be published in 2024. The main theme of the event will be THE ATTENTION ECONOMY. The event is co-organised by Maska and the Social Communication Research Center at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Neja Berger: Attention as distraction

Attention, as sustained thoughtful focus, differs from distraction solely in view of the deliberated object’s social value. Social risks and contradictions, typically regarded as a collective concern, have colonised privacy through processes of individualization and are nowadays considered exclusively from individual’s positions – attention aimed inwards as an outside distraction. Coincidentally, in this era of “the attention/distraction economy,” what we socially evaluate as distraction is extremely profitable for perpetuating the system and respective capital. Individual(‘s) guilt while serving the aforementioned purpose, reinforces the perception of individual responsibility and steers the(ir) focus towards strengthening personal discipline and continuously upgrading one’s biography. However, if disruption, which steers our thoughts towards the collective or outward, does exist, I’d call it art.

Matej Mihevc: The Emergence of Cultural Production

Since the advent of computation, we have been observing a trend of gradual adaptation of cultural production to our cognitive capacities, or a kind of feedback loop through which cultural production is gradually optimised and becomes more and more responsive to our presumed needs. In this context, we can speak of a kind of autonomy of cultural production, which begins to appear as a mechanism that is emergent and alien to human beings.

Sašo Slaček Brlek, Peter Sekloča: How are Slovenian newspapers adapting to the digital age?

Print media are much more affected than radio and television by the changes associated with digitalisation, as they are not able to compensate for lower revenues due to declining print circulations through digital subscriptions or advertising. Advertising revenues that once filled the pages of print news are now escaping over to digital channels, where digital platforms, notably Facebook and Google, take almost half of the pie. This means less money for newspapers, which have to find new ways to survive in the market. The newspaper industry has responded with cutbacks and austerity, which also means lower-paid and more precarious jobs for journalists with higher workloads. To compensate for the decline in revenues, newspaper companies are deepening their cooperation with advertisers, increasingly tailoring content to their interests and looking for ways to generate additional revenues outside the media market.

cover photo by Aleksander Sašo Slaček Brlek