Article notes
From Digital Lyceum Wiki
Working title: "The structure of attention in media rich environments: some practical considerations for design"
The article will begin by talking about traditional models of attention as it pertains to the lecture environment. The best work on this topic comes from Erving Goffman's essay called "The Lecture." I think it's in the volume Forms of Talk. Aubree, can you look into this? Goffman talks about the social contract that exists between the people in the room in constructing any "situation." The audience understands itself as audience, the lecturer understands his/her role as well. This social contract has little ambiguity and the event of the lecture works because participants tacitly agree to abide by the rules of that contract. The architecture of the environment assists in formulating that contract: position of the chairs, lectern, and screen. Our question is what happens when that architecture is reformulated to include what Joshua Meyrowitz calls information-flow. When other channels enter into the tacit agreement of the space, the "boundaries of the situation" are restructured. So when the audience is looking at laptops instead of at the speaker, there needs to be new forms of understanding to allow the event to hold together as an event. This is a matter of design. The digital tool needs to provide the scaffolding for that contract, not just for individual user experience. When users are engaged in SL, they similarly press up against the boundaries of the situation.
So, what we are talking about is structuring attention, not structuring reality (i.e. mixed reality). However we term it, we are talking about performativity. This is why our use of the term choreography makes good sense. Attention is not fixed: even when there are no backchannels, people's minds wander. We are staging a performance for the externalization of this mental wandering. So, we are not proposing to affix permanent categories of mental attention to the live event; rather, we are proposing to build a stage that allows for a complex choreography - the dance is different each time, but we are committed to recognizing it as a dance, and not a statue.
The last part of the article will discuss the specifics of the digital lyceum project - our attempt to role out our stage to as many people and contexts as possible and our attempt to build a critical mass of feedback about these events.
