Attention
Two writers told me today that they struggle with attention. For one of them, it's flitting from subject to subject that's the issue; for the other, email and web searches call beseechingly, constantly. All of us have trouble focusing our minds on what needs to be done in order to make sustained intellectual progress. I found the look of recognition that came from their eyes when we talked about attention to be both uplifting and saddening - so they're having trouble too - and I hope we all find moments of peace to contemplate in. Maybe tomorrow. There's always (usually) tomorrow.
Tonight was a session at the New School with danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, and Trebor Scholz. I paid attention, unswerving attention, until I became so hungry that I could not pay attention any longer — but by then, luckily, the session was over and I could go out into the evening. (It's not just email that gets in the way.)
All three had strong and interesting ideas to put across tonight, and questions to pose. For danah, the key move was looking away from constant concerns about privacy to focusing on new forms of public life online — “non-universal” publics that depend on new online architectural realities (persistence, searchability, replicability, invisible audiences). She points out that “we've got kids written out of public life” offline (it's too dangerous!) and so they're depending on mediated, online spaces to get access to their friends. We're just at the beginning of these developments, and we have no idea how the properties of online communications will play out over time. So we should pay attention.
For Trebor (they spoke in alpha order), the key move was the importance of “core site” mediated interactions (10 sites, like sina.com.cn, baidu, MySpace, taking up 40% of traffic) and noticing that a few context-providers are making money off the backs of many many people. Twelve percent of all US online time is spent on MySpace; 170 million profiles; 85% of all US students are on Facebook. He wants us to notice that platforms may be supporting particular politics (he's particularly scathing about MySpace) and taking advantage of the information and attention generated by their users. Trebor asks whether “net publics” should have control over their content and actually share the monetary value generated by it.
Ethan usefully chimed in at this point, noting that he thinks it's fine for businesses to rely on user-generated content — it costs a lot to run a huge number of servers. But his talk was mostly about the read-write politics made possible by online interactions, and he wanted to tell us that creative technical things happen in the most repressive regimes. He pointed out that the famous HRClinton video came three years after a similar video featuring an unelected Tunisian dictator. But that Tunisian ad was blocked in Tunisia. But the block was evaded by Tunisian software. There were lots of stories like this: Bahrain blocked Google maps because Bahrainians were noticing that they could use some land distribution policies, but then gave up on the blocking because people were evading it. Twitter can be used to let people know you've been arrested. Philippine election fraud and corruption became the subject of wildly popular ringtones. Video can be a tremendous medium for activism. But the Open Net Initiative map of internet censorship will someday be just like the map of [lack of] press freedom. We may focus too much on personalities, and not enough on the issues that oppressed Netizens are writing about.
All three speakers talked about the importance of “media literacy,” of figuring out for ourselves what the provenance of online speech is. And there was a certain amount of back and forth about big corporate online spaces. Trebor is worried about “investing [his] memories” in those spaces and having that abused (and that none of his students seem one bit worried about this); Ethan and danah point out that no one forces you to use these spaces, that hyperlinks cut across them, that they're convenient, and that people just want to use them to see their friends.
And then danah made the information overload/attention point that I knew must be coming, because I'd heard so much about attention today (paraphrase mine):
Maybe we should be asking ourselves when the transparency of public networked space becomes socially disruptive. There's only so much information you can cope with. Twitter is complete overload, but I'm glad it's here because it will force us to examine the question of how to deal with it. I don't have an answer. I'm just thinking “uh-oh”.
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