This link has been bookmarked by 66 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Jan 2017, by Tushar Deshpande.
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24 Feb 17
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22 Feb 17
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Nintendo recently released their first iPhone game, Mario Run. It feels uncommonly fresh. I’m not a big gamer (Clash of Clans and Mario Run are the only two mobile titles I’ve picked up in earnest in the last, say, twenty years) but the difference between CoC and Mario couldn’t be starker. Mario is finite, bounded. The edges are clear. You pay once, and there’s no other way for Nintendo to extract money from you. No single player is a mark. There are no whales. In Mario you can not only see the end but get there. Your points max out at 9999 (clearly Nintendo didn’t think everything through). Mario Run is human scale. Clash of Clans is machine scale, network scale.
When the scale of our systems with which we interact breaches our comprehension, and control of attention is weakened en masse, the opportunity for manipulation arises.
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10 Feb 17
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07 Feb 17
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02 Feb 17
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29 Jan 17
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27 Jan 17
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n 1992 Bill McKibben “spent many months of forty hour weeks” attempting to watch twenty-four hours of television as recorded on ninety-one cable stations in Virginia (at the time, the most in the world). He wrote up his findings in the book, “The Age of Missing Information.”
“We believe that we live in the ‘age of information.’” he writes. “That there has been an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.”
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25 Jan 17
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The more I thought about my attention the more I thought about the limits to human scale. How technologies inevitably amplify ourselves — the best and worst parts — in a way that is almost impossible for us to comprehend.
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23 Jan 17
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22 Jan 17
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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Blaise Pascal.
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“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Then is the lack of attention the opposite? Does it presuppose fear and hate?
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The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole.
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It’s become common to talk of the “weaponization” of attention.
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In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.
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There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed.
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Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised.
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19 Jan 17
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18 Jan 17
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17 Jan 17
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16 Jan 17
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mathew lowrythe deeper I went into my own work, the more I realized how my always-on, always-connected state had rendered me largely useless... The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole. I want my attention back...I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the mind that make me feel like I’m being productive. ... <br>Our attentions have been wrest from our control... We were reasonably autonomous things. Now we’re indifferently synchronous, easily manipulated... The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”... we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us...<br>
Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised.like productivity attentionweb psychology addiction doit cbot
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15 Jan 17
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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Blaise Pascal.
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In “Gravity and Grace,” Simone Weil writes, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Then is the lack of attention the opposite? Does it presuppose fear and hate?
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Was it pre-Snapchat or Instagram Stories? Before everything was filtered through a real-time performance?
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In 1992 Bill McKibben “spent many months of forty hour weeks” attempting to watch twenty-four hours of television as recorded on ninety-one cable stations in Virginia (at the time, the most in the world). He wrote up his findings in the book, “The Age of Missing Information.”
“We believe that we live in the ‘age of information.’” he writes. “That there has been an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.”
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The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole.
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the difference between CoC and Mario couldn’t be starker. Mario is finite, bounded. The edges are clear. You pay once, and there’s no other way for Nintendo to extract money from you. No single player is a mark. There are no whales. In Mario you can not only see the end but get there. Your points max out at 9999 (clearly Nintendo didn’t think everything through). Mario Run is human scale. Clash of Clans is machine scale, network scale.
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When the scale of our systems with which we interact breaches our comprehension, and control of attention is weakened en masse, the opportunity for manipulation arises. Danah Boyd maps the decade-plus arc of this sly influence:
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It’s become common to talk of the “weaponization” of attention. As in: The attention of Americans was weaponized to make facts out of falsities. I think this framing does a disservice to the crux of the problem. It’s not that our attention has been weaponized, a word that vanishes in hyperbole, but rather, mechanized. As in: Our attentions have been wrest from our control, like a flock of android starlings, or a million IP enabled toasters. We were reasonably autonomous things. Now we’re indifferently synchronous, easily manipulated.
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Harris points a finger at the software itself. That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” “You could say that it’s my responsibility” to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” In short, we’ve lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us.
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the distance between you and the library is usually vast. The distance between you and your smartphone isn’t. Friction vs frictionless. An endless refresh, always with more, optimized just for your interests, right in your hand. And yet, it’s not Wikipedia that we binge on all day
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There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed.
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- The internet goes off before bed.
- The internet doesn’t return until after lunch.
My attention so eager to latch onto whatever cleverly architected spaceship of dopamine was flying out from my consciousness. It was immediately clear that vigilance was required, some set of rules. And so here are mine:
That’s it. Reasonable rules. I’m too weak to handle the unreasonable.
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Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised. Though, attention is duplicitous — it doesn’t feel like a muscle. And exercising it doesn’t result in an appreciably healthier looking body. But it does result in a sense of grounding, feeling rational, control of your emotions — a healthy mind. Our measuring sticks for life tend to be optimized for material things, things easy to count. Houses, cars, husbands, babies, dollar bills. Attention is immaterial, difficult to track.
We deserve our attention.
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14 Jan 17
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13 Jan 17
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Robert Martinez"Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised. Though, attention is duplicitous — it doesn’t feel like a muscle. And exercising it doesn’t result in an appreciably healthier looking body. But it does result in a sense of grounding, feeling rational, control of your emotions — a healthy mind. Our measuring sticks for life tend to be optimized for material things, things easy to count. Houses, cars, husbands, babies, dollar bills. Attention is immaterial, difficult to track.
We deserve our attention."
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