Reputation: Ethics, Trust, and Relationships at Oxford
Dear All,
Please join us online on Thursday 27 November for the second R:ETRO seminar of this term, hosted by the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation.
Dr Leah Tomkins, Independent writer, scholar and leadership consultant will be presenting 'The ethics of attention: a dive into the Kafkaesque'
Our contemporary world is an 'attention economy' – an environment that nurtures and exploits an attention deficit disorder that distorts our personal, social, political and organisational relations. The tech giants' business model relies on maximising the time we spend on their products, with billions being spent on the algorithms of 'attention grab' which channel our purchases, passions and beliefs. Our leaders know that by distracting us onto their version of events, their 'alternative facts', we may succumb to the appeal of the lurid and divisive over the well-reasoned and multi-faceted. For many commentators, the liberation of human attention may be the defining ethical and political issue of our time, not least because it is a prerequisite for virtually all our other struggles and aspirations.
The dynamics of the 'attention economy' are not, however, new. In this talk, Leah will explore these issues through the prism of the early 20th century writer, Franz Kafka, highlighting Kafka's extraordinary prescience in understanding that power hinges on the 'attention grab'. In Kafka's world, someone always has to pay - one way or another - for the distortions and manipulations of attention, thus foreshadowing the slogan of the 'attention economy', 'if you're not the customer, you're the product'. Recalling William James' apocryphal remark, 'when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equate to what we have paid attention to', Kafka's ethics judge us not by virtue or vice, innocence or guilt, but by whether we have been paying proper attention.
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