There are certain topics that periodically rear their heads, such as privacy. The one that is on my mind this morning is attention. I don’t know whether there really is a deep attention crisis, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that we may well have a problem. Yesterday evening, I was watching my son’s Little League coach (another dad) desperately trying to get and keep the attention of a dozen 10-year old boys. Now that might have always been a hopeless task, but this was a stunning display of distractedness. Personally, I find it increasingly difficult to find solid blocks of time to think deeply about a specific problem.
To get more of the view that this is a real crisis, I have just downloaded Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” to my Kindle. I was prompted by reading Carr’s impassioned critique of Steve Pinker’s OpEd piece in the New York Times. It is somewhat germane to the subject to read this book on the Kindle as opposed to say an iPad. One advantage of reading on the Kindle is exactly that it doesn’t do anything else (well). There are no sudden blinking lights or vibrations asking for your attention. There is no temptation to check a stock quote or browse some web pages.
There were two other pieces over the weekend that also spoke to the critical role that attention plays now. danah boyd wrote how the hackers on 4chan are not about gaining access to systems (security hacking) but instead about (mis)directing attention. The more we rely on external systems for allocating our attention, the more we will be susceptible to such hacks. The other piece was about software tools that help people focus their attention by shutting out disruptions. I thought that was in the New York Times, but apparently I was so distracted that I didn’t bookmark that piece and in searching now the NY Times article I am finding is this one from 2009!
In any case, I am going to try some tools out myself and am also planning to rearrange my schedule so that I have clear blocks of time for just reading and thinking. Expect more posts on attention as I report on some of my reading and personal experiments. If you have a favorite tool or technique, please let me know!
