CCL member and Director of Birkbeck’s MA in Creative Writing, Julia Bell, recently launched her new book Radical Attention, which was published by Peninsula Press in October 2020. You can watch the launch event below, in which Julia Bell discusses how attention has been commodified within digital capitalism with Olivia Laing.
Radical Attention is an extended essay on the battle for our attention in the age of distraction. In today’s online economy, attention has become a commodity to be bought and sold. Bombarding us with free smartphone apps and news websites, developers and advertisers have turned what and how focus our attention into the world‘s fastest growing industry.
In exchange for our attention, information and entertainment is ever at our fingertips. But at what cost? In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell asks what has been lost in this trade off. How can we reclaim our attention? In a world of infinite distraction, how can attention become radical?
Olivia Laing has called Radical Attention a “[t]errifying, clarifying and ultimately hopeful, this is an essential book. Julia Bell grapples with the grim realities of our online lives, setting out possibilities for resisting and reclaiming our imperilled freedoms.”
For more information about Birkbeck’s MA Creative Writing, which Julia Bell directs, please click here.
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