David Landes

David Landes studies contemporary attention, drawing upon the fields of rhetoric, media, cultural studies, performance studies, and musicology.

His research brings together scientific and humanistic traditions in order to develop attentional capacities for communication and social issues widely lamented to be in breakdown. He studies how disciplines (and communities and traditions) differently conceive of attention as an object of study, a method of inquiry, and a technique of practice. Collecting diverse attentions helps conceive ongoing changes in attention itself—its constituting conditions, its infinite types, its situational dynamics, its strategic remakings—ultimately, to better confront the changing world that outpaces our attentional practices.

Landes’ forthcoming book Attention Literacy (MIT Press) conceives attention rhetorically (as an adaptive capacity malleable to situations, goals, and strategies) to provide practical heuristics and hermeneutics for communication in changing environments. His articles theorize upon case studies of attentional modes created when public phenomena (e.g., culture, technology) mingle with private agencies (e.g., volition, hermeneutics). This work of contextualizing and re-theorizing attentions makes their construction legible, providing renewed methodologies and practicalities.

Informing his research and teaching is an extensive background as a jazz-trained freelance musician cultivated in aesthetic communities (such as the Synchronicity Arts improvisation collective). Similarly relevant is Landes’ past IT work in Silicon Valley (including work with early pioneers of social media, Friendster, and of online education, Emergency University). Prior posts include Duke University, NYU Shanghai, the American University of Beirut (directing the Communication Skills Program), and the American University in Dubai (as founding director of its campuswide Speaking Skills Center to service 100+ nationalities).

Landes works with the interdisciplinary collective the Friends of Attention, co-authored their book Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown), and affiliates with the Strother School of Radical Attention in NYC. Additionally, Landes is an ongoing collaborator for multiple editions of the New York Times Bestseller Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion, a book on rhetoric and argument taught in over 3000 college courses and published in 15 languages.