HISTORIES OF ATTENTION MIND CONTROL (HIST241)

Department of History, Stanford University

2021

This course follows the history of attention from the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism to Cold War controversies over mind control and recent debates on the attention economy and the ethics of technology. Attention is the cognitive process that regulates consciousness to selectively concentrate on a discrete aspect of information. In an age of information abundance, digital technologies compete to catch and direct our attention. Offering a historical perspective, the course traces how attention has been constructed, studied, commodified, and manipulated throughout the modern period by traveling across various regions including the Middle East, Europe, the Caribbean and North America.

We explore how practices such as mesmerism, hypnotism, and conjure became part of power relationships within social, racial, gendered, religious and cultural contexts, and how attention was made to produce and reproduce different but comparable relationships of power and inequality between the industrial revolution and the advent of surveillance capitalism.