On Attention and the Internet

The difference between schools and libraries

From John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (via Austin Kleon):

To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.

For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do

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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.

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

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

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,... See more

One such protection would be a Social Accountability Act stipulating that every corporation be graded according to an index of social worthiness, to be compiled by panels of randomly selected citizens, the equivalent of juries, chosen from a diverse pool of stakeholders: the company’s customers, members of the communities it affects, and so on. If... See more