carefully considered scale. So in
a way, you could say that architecture and the city have always
been technologies of attention.
Now there is reason to reconsider all of this. Doing so will alas
take an outlay of attention. But
like a highway-resurfacing project,
that could be a temporary inconvenience for the sake of long-term
improvement. Besides, it is well
understood how the solution to
too much information is often
more (meta) information. Right
now attention to surroundings
could be worth your consideration. Right now, as the physical
world fills with ever more kinds
of digital media, in ever more contexts and formats, some workings
of attention may be changing.
Of course, context matters more
in an age of mobile, embedded, and
tangible computing. Yet despite
current obsessions with smartphones, mobility isn’t everything;
there are situated technologies, too.
Layers of technology accumulate
in the sites of everyday life, which
they seldom replace but often
transform. So, it is worth remembering that underneath today’s
rush to augment the city, fixed
forms do persist, and noticing and
working with them can improve
other sensibilities.
November + December 2012
interactions
An Inquiry into Attention
What is it like to make an amateur
inquiry into attention? [ 3] If you’re
not a Zen master or a neuroscientist, how do you come away with
meaningful results and not just
more overload? In particular, how
do you avoid neurobabble on how
technology makes “us” think this
way or that? What if you just want
to know a bit more about attention
in order to ground yourself in an
age of superabundant and increasingly ambient information?
Superabundance is the word for
it. You hardly meet anyone who
wants to go back to life as it was
before the Net. Let us rejoice: all
the world’s information at your
fingertips, and no need to clutter
your head with it! Well, information
of a kind. And except when it gets
in the way socially, or when corporations try to fence it off as their
own. Abuses of superabundance do
exist, and only time will tell which
of those are correctable, much as
it took 50 years to see what was
wrong with car-based transportation. Incidentally, hindsight also
seems helpful for remembering
that people have often cursed
at overload. Maybe always. For
example, more than 400 years have
passed since Erasmus, the first
modern editor, famously lamented,
“[I]s there no place to hide from this
great flood of books?” [ 4] Today’s
debates on overload often begin
with something like this. If you
believe the old truism about the
ability to keep no more than seven
things in mind at once, then there
must have been overload ever since
there were eight.
The world itself has been both
the cause and the cure of overload.
People of any era have been fascinated, intimidated, irritated, or
numbed by the world. Media may
of course up the ante on all of this.
Just about any stage in the history
of information technology—such
as newspapers or recorded music—
has been accused of cutting people
off from the world, and from each
other. Yet the natural world has
always saturated the senses, and
even without technological assistance, the senses mediate the
world. Indeed, if they ever stopped
filtering, you would quickly go mad.
The counterargument has its
merits. The human mind has
always loved to wander, but it never
had quite such exquisite means
of doing so. Never before did so
much experiential saturation come
from artifice, with such purpose-
ful design of interface. What has
changed is how much of the world
offers appeal and not menace, nov-
elty and not tedium, immediacy
and not heartbreaking distance.
Never before has such a spectrum
of the perceptual field been so
deliberately placed, or so deliber-
ately engineered for cognition.
