A message for the New Year.
instagram.comA message for the New Year.
“Our respect for attention is in decline. Timeless and eternal truths are forgotten in favor of breaking news and "what's trending."
Instead of deliberately choosing what to consume, we surrender to opaque algorithms that don’t always have our best interests in mind.
The alternative is an intentional and self-directed information diet - the pursuit
... See moreWe can explore the ways in which our attention is generated, manipulated, valued and degraded. Sometimes attention might simply be a lens through which to read the events of the moment. But it can also force us toward a better understanding of how our minds work or how we value our time and the time of others. Perhaps, just by acknowledging its pre... See more
nytimes.com • Opinion | Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age - The New York Times
In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it trie... See more
sari azout • My Favorite Questions
In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford called attention “the thing that is most one’s own” because what we pay attention to determines what is real to us, what is “actually present to our consciousness.” Just as we become what we eat, our reality becomes what we pay attention to. And just like our appetite has been hijacked by food enginee... See more
His biggest worry, though, is that we still mostly fail to acknowledge that we live in a roaring attention economy. In other words, we tend to ignore his favorite maxim, from the writer Howard Rheingold: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”