On Attention and the Internet
It’s almost like boredom doesn’t exist, like difficulty doesn’t exist, scarcity doesn’t exist. And a feeling I’ve been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning. When you’re surrounded by infinite possibilities, when you know around the next corner is another video that might be funnier, you’re never going to sit with the
... See moreThe reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
It seems to me that, through the way Reddit and YouTube and social media work, there’s such an emphasis on creating distinctions and communities, and it’s just created an explosion of interest in ideological sub-groupings that had been completely forgotten. I started in politics in the early ‘00s, and it just didn’t have this flavor. If you were a... See more
aaronzlewis.com • The Garden of Forking Memes: How Digital Media Distorts Our Sense of Time
Yeah, I think taste almost can move in two directions. There is that internal sense of what am I feeling when I experience a work of art? What is happening in my own brain, in my soul when I listen to this music?
And then there’s this external idea of it, which is being super self-conscious about what other people are consuming, how they’re... See more
And then there’s this external idea of it, which is being super self-conscious about what other people are consuming, how they’re... See more