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

The 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

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.

Privacy might be the digital spinach: something you know that’s good for you, beloved by regulators, but not a primary driver for anyone but the most extreme health consumers.

There was an interesting note in Alexander Obenauer’s lab notes about notifications, and this line stuck out to me: “fundamentally, the way notifications work in modern OSes is backwards: someone else decides when (and how often) my device wakes up to interrupt what I’m doing.” In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the... See more

everything is hyper engineered to make you addicted https://t.co/J7WvnjoAdQ

The “soft” characteristics of any kind of contemplative behavior (slowness, eddying, meandering) make it easy to devalue. And this, too: creative space often feels resistant, like it’s denying us something, won’t speak, won’t produce—when in reality it’s just quiet, it’s not dancing for us, or “entertaining,” or feeding us dopamine edibles.