02.182HT Attention Economics: Media, Design, Capital
This course examines the attention economy as a historical, aesthetic, and political formation shaped by media technologies, perceptual regimes, labour relations, and capitalist accumulation. Moving from theories of perception and modernity to today’s platform capitalism, surveillance culture, and burnout, the course treats attention not merely as an individual cognitive resource but as a socially produced, economically exploited, and politically contested capacity.
While grounded in Western critical theory, the course considers how these ideas resonate within East and Southeast Asian settings—particularly in the context of regional development, digital platforms, and everyday technological life. Students will explore how attention links to discipline, productivity, affect, and control across connected global and regional systems.
For students in technology and design, the course offers critical grounding in how attention is engineered, monetised, and managed across digital and AI-driven environments. Through readings, discussion, and reflection, students will examine how habits of focus, distraction, and
fatigue emerge from the infrastructures and interfaces that organize daily life. The course equips students to think more ethically and creatively about human-AI interaction and to imagine design practices that respect the limits of attention and the values of care, sustainability, and collective well-being.
Learning objectives
- Students will understand and explain key arguments from course readings through oral presentation and discussion and connect texts to contemporary media/design contexts.
- Students will apply course concepts to analyse personal device usage patterns and evaluate personal media habits.
- Students will analyse attention-capturing mechanisms in digital platforms and create alternative design approaches addressing ethical and political implications of the attention economy.
- Students will evaluate the role of attention across historical and contemporary media systems and understand and synthesise course themes connecting historical theory to current design practice.
Measurable outcomes
- Students deliver a 5–10-minute discussion lead summarising one assigned text’s central argument and posing substantive questions. Students contribute meaningfully to class discussions throughout the semester.
- Students submit a dossier documenting 5-7 days of Screen Time data identifying attention patterns, connected to two course concepts, with realistic intervention proposals. Students articulate trade-offs of personal attention patterns through critical analysis in the dossier.
- Working in groups, students break down at least three platform design features using course concepts in a 12–15-minute case study presentation and propose a plausible alternative design/policy reducing exploitative attention practices.
- Students write a 800-1,200 word in-class final essay making a clearly argued judgment about attention management in platform/AI systems, supported by at least two course themes/readings and correctly explain historical frameworks and their relevance to contemporary attention issues within 120 minutes.
Course requirements
| Assessment | Percentage |
| WEC – Class participation | 15 |
| WEC – Class Assignment – Discussion Lead | 10 |
| WEC – Individual Project – Attention Tracking Dossier | 25 |
| WEC – Group Project – Case Study Presentation | 25 |
| WEC – Final Essay | 25 |
Course outline
Week 1: Introduction — What Is the Attention Economy?
Week 2: Histories of the Senses — Modernity, Urban Life, Mediation
Week 3: Technologies of Perception — Designing the Gaze
Week 4: Perception, Time, Labor — Discipline and Productivity
Week 5: Persuasive New Media — Habit, Design, and Behavioral Capture
Week 6: Spectacle, Affect, and Mediation Week 7: Recess Week
Week 7: Recess Week
Week 8: Attention as Commodity — Affective and Digital Labor
Week 9: Platform Capitalism — Global and Asian Variants
Week 10: Algorithms, Data, and Cognitive Capital
Week 11: Control, Visibility, and Power
Week 12: Fatigue, Burnout, and 24/7 Life
Week 13: Resistance, Refusal, and Reorganizing Attention
Week 14: Exam Week