On Attention and the Internet
Something else happens in a world of superabundance, and an attention economy. Because you can’t find what you want, you start to dig yourself into very specific niches, and join sub-groups. Everyone atomizes into millions of groups connected by very specific interests. In more benign ways, it can be great – you find your fellow travelers, and I... See more
Ten (Big) Trends
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
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Attention is a finite resource, and how we choose to spend our attention online is, in some ways, a direct reflection of where human culture has gone in an era where access to information is basically unlimited. We are very much in our teenage years—that is, we suddenly have all these new capabilities and it’s really easy to just run wild. But... See more
Laurel Schwulst • Charles Broskoski on self-discovery that happens upon revisiting things you’ve accumulated over time
Manifesto for a Humane Web
humanewebmanifesto.com
The quest to design an app that facilitates mindful attention is “impossible to fulfill as the affordances of the smartphone and its suite of digital tools capture attention in equal—if not greater—measure as meditation apps claim to give it back,” concludes Jablonsky.
Matthew Nisbet • The Multitasking Meditator
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
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
Ritual technology
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