Attention

The instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory

Our attention is sacred. It’s an act of worship in itself. An act of spiritual, mental, and emotional formation. When you give something your attention – a movie, a conversation, a project at work – you’re declaring it the most important thing in your life. It may sound dramatic, but at its core, it’s true. When you pay attention to something,... See more

The internet, or “the information superhighway” as we Germans like to call it 🫠 is overwhelming people while making them addicted to it. In the piece below, Kyle Chayka frames curation as a way to slow down that information autobahn. By slowing down, curation offers people time to breathe and fully take in a piece of “content” instead of mindlessly... See more

Subtle shifts in language can sometimes have surprising consequences. The language of attention seems particularly loaded with economic and value-oriented metaphors, such as when we speak of paying attention or imagine our attention as a scarce resource we must either waste or horde. However, to my ears, the related language of attending to the... See more

There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally... See more