Blogmark

attention has of course always mattered... But it is because we have today found a way of treating something fundamentally intangible—the stream of consciousness—as fungible into other kinds of goods (like money or data) that it has become an object charged with public concern.

smartphone :: rosary

One might say that the monastery was the first attention platform, the first setting in which attention and its disciplines were a central and explicit issue—and not only in the day’s large blocks of activity, but in the cracks and breaks between them as well. For this reason, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has compared the smartphone to the rosary.

Increase profits by finding the most inviting hue of blue

Google (to take one well-known example) claims to have made an additional $200 million dollars in 2014 solely by having tuned its advertising links to precisely the right shade of blue.

Severance vibes

Our fragmented sensory experience during these packets of time is reified into data. Meanwhile, our experience of time is severed from the past and future and exiled into a kind of eternal present.

This is how I run. I don't listen to music or audiobooks. I don't hit the pavement with specific things to think through. I just run and my mind (and attention) ebbs and flows to the rhythm of my route and my mind.

Instead, we might try to reconceive attention not as a moment or as a product of a momentary decision but as a rhythm inhering within a pattern of life.

Article shared by David Crespo.