Digital technology is playing an increasingly large role in our lives. We use our smartphones to communicate, post photos, read breaking news, watch videos, and more — to the point where we touch our phones an average of 2,600 times a day, according to a study by research firm Dscout.
Author James Williams joins Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang in this episode to discuss his new book, “Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy.” The book examines the attention economy and how this relentless competition for attention from our digital products and services is undermining individual human will and democracy at large.
The book was chosen by Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83 as the pre-read selection for the Class of 2023. Williams joined Eisgruber and other faculty (including Wang) at a Sept. 9 book talk.
The recipient of the inaugural Cambridge University “Nine Dots Prize” for original thinking in 2017, Williams recently completed his doctoral work in philosophy at Oxford University. Before that, he worked for Google as a technology and business strategist. He also is a co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign, a project that aims to steer technology design toward having greater respect for users’ attention, goals, and values. His writing about the philosophy and ethics of technology has been published in The Observer, WIRED, and other publications.
ABOUT THE HOSTS
Wang is a professor at Princeton University, appointed in neuroscience with affiliate appointments in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Center for Information Technology Policy. An alumnus of Caltech, where he received a B.S. with honors in physics, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Stanford University School of Medicine. He conducted postdoctoral research at Duke University Medical Center and at Bell Labs Lucent Technologies. He has also worked on science and education policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is noted for his application of data analytics and poll aggregation to American politics. He is leading an effort at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to build a 50-state data resource for legislative-quality citizen redistricting. His work to define a state-level legal theory to limit partisan gerrymandering recently won Common Cause’s Gerrymandering Standard Writing Contest. His neuroscience research concerns how the brain learns from sensory experience in early life, adulthood and autism.
Zelizer has been among the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a CNN political analyst. He has written more than 900 op-eds, including his popular weekly column for CNN.com and The Atlantic. This year, he is the distinguished senior fellow at the New York Historical Society, where he is writing a biography of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel for Yale University's Jewish Lives Series. He is the author and editor of more than 19 books including, “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society,” the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress. In January 2019, Norton published his new book, co-authored with Kevin Kruse, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.” In spring 2020, Penguin Press will publish his other book, “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.” He has received fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and New America.