On Attention and the Internet
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 consumin... 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 consumin... See more
‘The Ezra Klein Show’ • How to Discover Your Own Taste
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
"When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible." (Byung-Chal Han, Vita Contemplativa)
What we have long called the creator economy is evolving to become more of a “meaning economy,” where the creators and brands and experiences that engage us will do so through story, craft, and a deeper and more sophisticated sense of meaning. The creator economy was ultimately driven by content (enabled by ubiquitous access to content creation and... 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
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
Why I don't like algorithmic/filter bubbles/for you feeds:
I refuse to be one thing. I’m two things, three things, a hundred things at once, and I’ll be a hundred different things tomorrow. I don’t want the convenience of being collapsed, defined, optimized for legibility. I want to be aerated, blobby, and porous. I want to be the sea around an ... See more
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.
Lia Purpura • The Ecology of Attention
Availability is no longer determined by one’s time, but by one’s attention. The problem, of course, is that our attention is constantly absorbed by the tools we use everyday, making us feel like we’re never truly available. As these tools continue to get nicer, prettier, and more powerful, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop checking them, wh... See more