Attention
The most straightforward way to improve your information diet is to develop a habit for meta-awareness; to pay attention to what you're paying attention to.
The Intellectual Obesity Crisis
Information and media abundance have made us cognitively impatient. We don't want to spend the time.
With information flooding in from near and far, people were falling victim to “present-mindedness.” They were so busy consuming new information that they had no time to step back and view the information in a broad historical and cultural context. Overwhelmed by immediate concerns and diversions, they shunned the hard, slow work of interpretation.
Nicholas Carr • The Tyranny of Now
... See moreWhat we need to survive is more than mere attention: we need care. But attention is a necessary precondition for care. In this way, we are creatures whose very survival depends on attention. We perish in neglect. As part of that inescapable inheritance, we will forever be invested in other people paying attention to us. We are creatures that pay at
... See moreThey waste our time for their benefit. When you understand it like that, spam isn't a side problem or trivial problem; it is the problem of our time. Spam is all the things we don't want to pay attention to that want our attention. Spam arises from the tension between the two foundational facts of the attention age: information is infinite, attenti
Attending to people and having them attend to us is our normal state of being. Social attention is like sunlight for a plant: we needed to live. It warms and nourishes us. We stretch toward its presence; we shrivel in its absence.
The Sirens Call
There are two parts of attention: grabbing it and holding it. It is easier to grab attention than to hold it. - Chris Hayes
... See moreThis rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, I'm going to argue, a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism.
The
... See moreBoredom, it seems, is the by product of a specific civilization arrangement. It's true, as I argued in the last chapter, that certain aspects of our attention are biophysical, and as such universal. The loud sudden noise of an approaching avalanche will grab the focus of any hearing human of any culture. The same goes for a charging predator. But w