Seventeenth International Conference on the Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The paper argues for the new role of museum as a site of attention care. While attention scarcity predates digital media (Citton, 2019, p.102), digital technologies introduced economy models where users’ attention became source of profit and data collection targets users at individual level (Bhargava, Velasquez 2021, p.341). There are growing concerns about potential damaging effects on limited attention ‘human bandwidth’ (Davenport, Beck 2001, p.2), the impoverishment of background attention (Citton 2019, p.117), and other types of attention (Carasco, 2011, p.1487), including creative attention, which, unlike recognitive attention which operates within established classifications, forms new categories and understandings (Citton, 2019, p.105). I posit museum experiences as embodied events which can support and re-engage creative attention negatively affected by prolonged exposure to digital media platforms. Museums enable ‘aesthetic attention’ (Citton, p.105), through objects and experiences which defy or exceed our preconceptions, and thus enable the delay between the perceiving moment and hypothesis about the nature of what is perceived. This delay is a condition for enabling reflective attention, as we re-evaluate and create new categories and meanings. Taking the potential of ‘aesthetic attention’ as point of departure, I assert that museums can employ a range of strategies with this goal and purpose in mind and play a role in stimulating types of attention often less profitable for extractivist attention economies. I posit fostering creative attention as a new important aspect of the role of museums, counteracting the effects the attention economy is having on human perception and cognition processes.