Matthew Dennis - “Repurposing Persuasive Technologies for Digital Well-Being” - Monday, June 19, 2023 1:00 PM-2:30 PM CET

[ISHPSS]

 

From: Bombaerts, Gunter

Online seminar series on “Attending as practice in the attention economy”

Matthew Dennis

“Repurposing Persuasive Technologies for Digital Well-Being”

Monday, June 19, 2023 1:00 PM-2:30 PM CET

 

Interested in attending?

Please write to Secretariat.P&E...@tue.nl if you want to attend this session (or others, see below). You will then receive a link to join the online seminar.

 

Matthew Dennis is an Assistant Professor in Ethics of Technology in the Philosophy & Ethics Group. He specialises in the ethics of artificial intelligence, algorithmic fairness, and the future of work. His recent publications focus on how we can live well with emerging technologies. He was previously a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at TU Delft (2019–21) and an Early Career Innovation Fellow at University of Warwick (2019). He received his Joint Monash-Warwick PhD in 2019.

 

Abstract: Persuasive technologies (e.g., micro-targeting, e-nudges, digital choice architecture, gamification) threaten our digital well-being. They do this by undermining our ability to focus, deliberate, and act autonomously, which ethicists view as necessary conditions for leading a flourishing life. To date, the most influential ethical approaches to digital well-being have been user-focused, concentrating on the capabilities (Oosterlaken 2015, Johnstone 2012), character-traits (Harrison 2016, Vallor 2016), or reflective capacities (Sullivan & Reiner 2019) that users need to flourish online. Nevertheless, such approaches require users to take complete responsibility for their digital well-being, which makes little sense given the manipulative power of persuasive technologies. Value-sensitive designers (VSD) have responded to these concerns by suggesting that online technologies should be designed in ways that nudge us towards a better online behaviour. Prominent NGOs (such as the US-based Center for Humane Technology) and tech corporations (Google) are now considering VSD as a way to improve the digital well- being of their users. A value-sensitive design approach proposes repurposing persuasive technologies, so these technologies actively promote digital well-being, rather than simply increasing user engagement (scrolling, clicking, swiping). This shifts the bulk of responsibility for digital well-being from users to providers.

 

 

Aim: Within the ESDiT (Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies) project, the working group on “Attention Economy” organizes an online seminar-series  on “Attending as practice in the attention economy”. The online series aims to contribute, using philosophy and ethics, to constructively critique the attention economy (the tech industry's business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource).

 

We are currently planning the subsequent sessions that will take place after the summer.

You can watch the presentations of the previous sessions here:

Peter Hershock	“Intelligent Technology, the Attention Economy, and the Risks of Consciousness Hacking: A Buddhist Perspective”
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza	“Grounding ethics through attention: Murdoch, Weil, and Zen Buddhism”
Soraj Hongladarom	“Toward an Ethics of Attention.”
Dan Nixon	"Just Perceive: How Phenomenology and the Arts Can Guide Us in the Tech Era"
Sebastian Watzl And Katharine Naomi Whitfield Browne	'The Commodification of Attention. An analysis and ethical assessment’
Tom Hannes	The Attention of Ethics; Zen and the Art of Dealing with the Attention Economy

 

 

We are looking forward discussing this with you.

Gunter Bombaerts, Joel Anderson, Matthew Dennis, Lily Frank, Tom Hannes, Jeroen Hopster, Madelaine Ley, Lavinia Marin, Alessio Gerola and Andreas Spahn

 

 

Background

The “attention economy” refers to the tech industry's business model that treats human attention as a commodifiable resource. The libertarian critique of this model, dominant within tech and philosophical communities, claims that the persuasive technologies of the attention economy infringe on the individual user's autonomy and therefore the proposed solutions focus on safeguarding personal freedom through expanding individual control.

While this push back is important, it uncritically accepts the framing of attention as a scarce commodity, giving rise to incomplete assessments of the moral significance of attention, and obscuring richer sets of ethical strategies to cope with the challenges of the attention economy.

We step away from a negative analysis in terms of external distractions and aim for positive answers, by approaching attention as practice.

The series engages with speakers from all kinds of backgrounds (philosophy on authors like Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Simone Weil, Merleau-Ponty, Harry Frankfurt, or Buddhist ethics …; psychology; artificial intelligence; …).

Questions that will be central in the online series:

1-What do attention and related concepts mean in the “attention economy”?

2-How is attention a basis for or related to morality?

3-How can attention (and related concepts) be built in the design of the attention economy in a humane way?

To answer this last question, we think the philosophical debate should turn from a negative to a positive focus:

• From “What are the distractions?” to “How can wisdom practices, virtues, … support a desirable form of attention?”;
• From “I must take back control of my attention” to “How can we use attention for flourishing, wisdom, …?”;
• From reacting against “promising (false?) free comfort” to supporting “acceptance of necessary effort”; and
• From “increasing individual needs in the attention economy” to support “collective or intentional joint attention in the attention ecology”.