Back at work, still trying to shake off the remaining shreds of travel crud, and get my head as they say back in the game.
Still the temptation to click and distract myself from the responsibilities of the job is great. Beyond everything else, I’m trying to get back into the habit of posting every day here.
Here’s today’s thought:
Things receive attention whether or not they are worthy of it.
Attention is no index of value, unless you are in the business of selling attention.
In other words, if you are in advertising.
It is the unstated goal of much modern media to fragment attention, so that the pieces of our consciousness can be caught on shining hooks of ads.
How can digital cultural communities work to enhance rather than erode attention?
Tags: daily photo, digital life
How can digital cultural communities work to enhance rather than erode attention?
Wow, Nayland, what an awesome question.
What comes to mind first is that they must be focused — such as a community devoted to photography, or education, or mathematics, etc. But that feels like a cop-out, even to me, because those communities can also become massive time-sinks and be totally counterproductive.
Is it a matter of purpose — that is, would collaborating to produce some work be sufficient?
Perhaps I don't know how attention is enhanced, in general — even outside the digital communities.
I think that the problem is structural more than one of content: digital media tends to make the experience of all kinds of content interchangeable, but what if software designers made it difficult or impossible to do something else on the computer when the program is running?
Writers often speak about the struggle of dealing with the blank page, and there are now a number of wordprocessing programs that try to replicate that experience. What if our digital tools , instead of offering us options, offered us the silence to understand our own struggles?
Like WriteRoom? http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
Is that what you mean?
I thought you were talking about *communities* such as facebook, livejournal, email lists, etc. Perhaps I completely missed your point.