David Landes, University of Pittsburgh

Description: Description: David Landes drumming at UCSB.jpg

David B. Landes DavidBLandes@gmail.com

Office Office Hours Mailbox	1101-C Cathedral of Learning Tue 11-1 and by appointment 1117 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260

Doctoral student in Rhetoric, Media, and Communication at the University of Pittsburgh.

Academic Interests: Rhetorical theory, media studies, culture and communication technology, attention economy, language theory, improvisation.

Prospective Project: Communication always exchanges on the currency of human attention, the cognitive capital of the information age. But today’s noisy mediascape and increasingly technical society also disfigure the age-old virtue of focus thought necessary for individual well-being and for deliberative democracy. I am developing theoretical accounts of how attention structures communication and how communication structures attention. I emphasize attention’s dialogic character as a constant conversation of mind and matter—notoriously susceptible to rhetorical artistry—that steers our deepest capacities for autonomy, humanity, and experience. Attending creatively to attention itself turns the eye back onto itself and promises to help equip us against the mounting forces of mental and social disintegration within modernity’s intensifying maelstrom of the senses.