Through the Google Glass: Configurations of Attention in the Age of Digital Media

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss a recently documented case of media addiction, that of the first person ever to be treated for internet addiction induced by the use of Google Glass. Taking this case as a starting point, I draw together strands from new materialism and N. Katherine Hayles’ work on attention in order to argue that the contemporary debate on media addiction translates into a reconfiguration of attention as an embodied, embedded and finite resource. Google Glass thus occupies a precarious and paradoxical place in today’s attention economy: as both a gateway to a technical wonderland, and as a corrosive agent that disrupts the proper workings of the social.