Our Team

We are a group of educators based at the University of Oslo. Our core research team is part of the "Salient Solutions" research project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

We are interested in the ways that what we pay attention to is influenced by outside actors, such as technology companies, the online advertisement industry, various political actors, and what ethical problems this raises for us as individuals and a society. Our aim is both to better understand these problems as well as to offer solutions to them.

Principal Researcher

Katharine Browne

My primary research interests are in ethics, social philosophy, and philosophy of economics.

I received my PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto, and have held postdoctoral fellowships in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oslo in Norway.

Project Leader

Sebastian Watzl

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo. My work focuses on the philosophy of mind, and my specialties are philosophical issues about attention.

After an MA in biology at Humboldt University Berlin, I received an MA in philosophy from New York University and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University. I came to Oslo after a postdoc at the interdisciplinary Mind-Brain-Behavior program at Harvard University

Collaborator

Tone Hagerup

I have a major in History of Religion from University of Oslo, where I now teach Religion and ethics didactics, for teachers in training. I have taught Religion and ethics in upper secondary school for more than 15 years, and have also made digital teaching resources for Aschehoug publishing house.

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Research Assistant

Line Horgen Thorstad

I am very interested in the relation between attention and agency, and the impact digital media has on our lives. I study philosophy at the university of Oslo, and am the chairman of the board for the organization Eksist!. Eksist! work on themes related to attention capitalism, digital media and freedom.

Our Research

Our current society is dominated by mass information, digital technology, and social media. As such, questions arise about how we should organize the abundance of information that we encounter. What should we pay attention to? As individuals? Collectively? Should we pay attention to the climate crisis or to the cute cat videos on TikTok? Or, if there are many things that are equally worthy of our attention, and if we cannot pay attention to everything, how are we to decide?

At the same time, digital technology and social media makes it ever more possible for outside actors to influence what we pay attention to. Technology companies design their platforms to harvest as much of our attention as possible. The algorithms they employ to do this give us a constant stream of information that is tailored specifically to us. Advertisement companies use targeted advertisement to increase the chances that we will buy their products.

Political actors can also shape what we pay attention to. States can use nudging techniques to attract attention to options favorable for the public good. Music, radio, film, and now social media technology, for example, can be used to coordinate social attention; so too can political propaganda, fake news and disinformation, the spread of which is often faciliated by social media platforms. Attention can also be strategically diverted from other issues, by, for example "flooding the zone" with fake news and various scandals designed mostly to disorient and distract.

Attention-directing strategies like those above invite the following ethical questions: Do technology companies exploit us and our attention for their personal gain? Do advertisement agencies manipulate us into buying their products by making it impossible not to pay attention to their ads? Do governments undermine the autonomy or trust of their citizens when they nudge them to live more healthy lifestyles or become vaccinated? Do social media platforms shape what we pay attention to in ways that polarize society or cause violence? Does the online spread of misinformation undermine the common ground essential for democratic engagement?

At Salient Solutions, we investigate these questions academically with the tools of philosophy and neighbouring disciplines. We aim to both to better understand the ways that the deliberate shaping of attention can pose threats to society and to find ethically acceptable ways of resolving them. We have developed this online resource to introduce students to some of the topics we are working on.

More about our research can be found on our project website.

To Lessons

To Project Website

Funding

Salient Solutions is funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR) with the project number 315373 (SAMRISK-2 ‘Samfunnssikkerhet og risiko’ funding scheme).

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Austin Baker, Drew Johnson, Zsolt Kapelner, and Line Horgen Thorstad for helpful feedback on the content of this website.

Ethics, Attention, and the Digital World

Our Team

Our Research

Funding

Acknowledgements