Attention
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 consi... See more
The Battle for Attention
What is attention?
Americans have tripled the time spent in meetings since 2020, data from Microsoft’s suite of business software show—leaving less time for the casual interactions that social scientists say foster happiness at work.
workfutures • What Is New
As we are fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches. In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine — the creation of the “Island". On this island, the slang, in-jokes, and archetypes which emerge as a community develops in isolatio... See more
TikTok, like all social media, is a similarly volatile space. Your FYP algorithm is supersensitive; “vibes” are constantly “shifting” for occult and obscure reasons; everything is temporary; and your chief means of expressing preference is to either click or keep scrolling. For this reason I suspect that the experience of electoral volatility is bo
... See moreMax Read • The TikTok Electorate
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 mindlessl... See more
