Le séminaire du CIS a reçu en visioconférence Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London) le 14 avril 2022. L’enregistrement vidéo est disponible.
An archaeology of digital attention: radar, war, and the birth of ubiquitous vigilance
EN. Attention is historically-specific, the product of human and nonhuman elements working in concert. Often the design of these elements’ interaction responds to specific moments and crises (spiritual, political, economic, etc.) which then shape other, diverse spheres of practice and technology. In this presentation I examine one such specific mode of attention, “electronic vigilance”, and is creation through the conditions of twentieth-century warfare. The rise of jets, long distance high-power ballistics, atomic weapons, and a “Cold War” with no planetary limits on the likely time and place of mass destruction, mobilised the invention of a new kind of human-machine system, the digital ecosystem. Elements in the system devised to meet this open-ended threat included magnetic core memory, touch-screen technology, computer graphics, real-time digital networks and, most essentially, a user who practiced perpetual vigilance. The history of this user and the modes of attention they practice offers resources for thinking critically about the modes of attention practiced in digital ecosystems today.
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Senior Lecturer in the history and theory of digital media at King’s College London. He is a media theorist and historian of science researching how digital technologies shape science, culture, and the environment.
« Underground NORAD Complex in North Bay », Canadian Forces Museum of Aerospace Defence.