Attention
Let's say you're dividing your time between weeks in the jungle exploring Mayan ruins and addictively surfing the net from your Manhattan apartment — but what you'd really like to be doing is writing the Great American Novel. Or let's say you're interested in becoming a well-read person while trying to turn out newpaper columns and commuting and keeping up with your family (and addictively responding to email from your office). Or maybe you just want to get some long law review article written that will change the world, but you keep wondering whether someone has been trying to get in touch with you online.
Maybe even now you're waiting for peace and focus to descend on you, and you're wishing that you had a long plane flight ahead - anything, anything at all to keep you from being distracted.
It's clear that speakers can't take the attention of their audiences for granted. But it's also apparent that knowledge-workers (or whoever it is that might be reading these words right now) can't take their own attention for granted. This focus can be split in a hundred pieces across a dozen tasks every day. We can be deeply embedded in a hundred different online communities. That's all fine.
But what's happening to our ability to do longterm work? Do we now have to go to greater lengths than earlier generations did to get anything done? Is there a cost to this fractured attention, or are we just getting better at processing information — so that we really can listen to a podcast, write an email, open a chat session, and write the Great American Novel all at once?
Gotta go. Someone's IMing me.
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4 Responses to “Attention”
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Susan,
I believe this passage from “The German Ideology” might contain some insights.
Here is the actual text:
Click here
“Private Property and Communism
With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.
Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest”, but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. ”
All you have to do is substitute “communisam” with “US Capitalism”.
Keith
Similar article from March 2003 on how to avoid it, how it lessens productivity, etc.
1) The Tyranny of Email
2) Tyranny Revisited (IMs etc)
Substitute the phrase “law school student” for “knowledge worker”…
I am deeply interested in property and i was surfing the web the other night, and found the site imobissimo.com it is the most amasing site that i have seen in a long time and if you ask me, it will change the industry drastically! it has the largest database of property available in spain any replies would be much appreciated.