The more I consider it, the more I realize that attention, properly directed, is the solution to many of our difficulties.
We tend to underrate the value of the simple act of attention, but I assure you that Madison Avenue and political propagandists do not.
After all, as the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”
And the poet Mary Oliver advised, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
Merely momentarily shift your attention from your driving to your phone, for example, and a child may die. This isn’t a metaphor, but a memory. The driver was a teenage girl, and the child was an 8-year-old boy.
Jamie Stantonian: "At the same time McLuhan was captivating television audiences with his often cryptic prophesies and ideas, the political scientist Simon Herbert was discussing the evolving landscape of communication technology from a less poetic, but perhaps more practical perspective. When he coined the phrase “attention economy” in the early 70s, about 18 computers were attached to the internet. But even though the internet was still in its infancy, he could see how the growth of global mass media and cheap publishing were putting an increasing strain on our ability to collect and process information, writing that:
ReplyDelete“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”