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A Penny For Your Thoughts
Dec. 12th, 2018 11:19 amIt was 29 when I got up this morning, and when I went to read the rain gauge, the top was frosted to the collection tube! Not that a frost or two, or even three, is unusual for this area, I've just never had to crack ice off the rain gauge before. The birdbath had a crust of ice over the top, and the ramp up to the deck was slick and you needed to penguin-walk to avoid slipping. It's a much more comfy 60 now, in the house anyway.
The train of thought that yesterday departed from the Social Media Is Wreaking Havoc Station has pulled in at Attention Is Currency.
That idea is not even remotely new or original, but I am making it a watchword (watch ... phrase? can it be a watchword if it has more than one word?) for the coming months. Sometimes things I know in my brain take a while to actually turn into a realization. I need time to ponder things, so another aspect of social media like FB that bothers me is the sheer speed at which you're expected to process things. I sometimes spend days, or a week or more, turning over one notion only to find that everyone else seems to have moved on. In some ways I'm not very smart - the sheer glacial pace of my cognitive processes was always a ding against me as a kid, but sometimes it's best to be the worst horse. So anyway, enough about my brain meat.
Where you put your attention says worlds about you. And there is so much, so very very much competing for that attention every moment of the day that some people wind up in the unfortunate position of trying to pay attention to everything at once. My thesis advisor had one of those fragmented postmodern consciousnesses. I don't - I'm a mono-tasker, and someone who easily becomes overstimulated, overwhelmed, and peopled out. So when I'm at home I can be selective about where my attention goes - for example right now I am writing, listening to music, and petting a cat when I pause to gather my thoughts.
In previous ages it would have been like this quite a bit. And please don't mistake this as nostalgia or anything - I do not want to see a return to the 40s or 50s, or whatever decade it is we're idealizing right now. But this morning I was deleting and archiving a lot of the email I got overnight. Gmail now has a handy "unsubscribe" feature, though sometimes I think trying to unsubscribe from mailing lists just gets you on more mailing lists, so if I unsubscribed once but now get different emails from the same company I just report spam and block.
Obviously since it's the holiday season a lot of those emails are trying to sell me something - some tangible object to give someone else, because capitalism. This is the time of year when I really see who all has my email address and I take advantage of it to try to get off as many lists as I can. But that left me wondering today, what are the lists I remain on selling me? And not just in the form of "buy this thing it's a perfect Xmas gift," but on a more subtle level. We "pay attention," so what am I buying with my attention? Sometimes I let lists slide if they don't send me things very often, but still, what are they peddling?
Being able to curate and control one's digital life is in many ways a great luxury. So my personal project over the next couple of days is looking more closely at what online entities are nickel-and-diming my attention. Yeah it takes less than a second to swipe away an unwanted email solicitation, but that's still time and cognition. So I bought some compression socks, or a cat drinking fountain, or a book, and I'm supposed to get email for the rest of my life? Mmmm, no.
And this isn't even beginning to get into the area of current events and attention. I think a lot of us are well aware of the fuckery that goes on with people trying to direct our attention to this or that, and away from this other thing.
I haven't reached any good conclusions here, but I need to get an eight-mile run today, and I want to do it while it's reasonably warm.
The train of thought that yesterday departed from the Social Media Is Wreaking Havoc Station has pulled in at Attention Is Currency.
That idea is not even remotely new or original, but I am making it a watchword (watch ... phrase? can it be a watchword if it has more than one word?) for the coming months. Sometimes things I know in my brain take a while to actually turn into a realization. I need time to ponder things, so another aspect of social media like FB that bothers me is the sheer speed at which you're expected to process things. I sometimes spend days, or a week or more, turning over one notion only to find that everyone else seems to have moved on. In some ways I'm not very smart - the sheer glacial pace of my cognitive processes was always a ding against me as a kid, but sometimes it's best to be the worst horse. So anyway, enough about my brain meat.
Where you put your attention says worlds about you. And there is so much, so very very much competing for that attention every moment of the day that some people wind up in the unfortunate position of trying to pay attention to everything at once. My thesis advisor had one of those fragmented postmodern consciousnesses. I don't - I'm a mono-tasker, and someone who easily becomes overstimulated, overwhelmed, and peopled out. So when I'm at home I can be selective about where my attention goes - for example right now I am writing, listening to music, and petting a cat when I pause to gather my thoughts.
In previous ages it would have been like this quite a bit. And please don't mistake this as nostalgia or anything - I do not want to see a return to the 40s or 50s, or whatever decade it is we're idealizing right now. But this morning I was deleting and archiving a lot of the email I got overnight. Gmail now has a handy "unsubscribe" feature, though sometimes I think trying to unsubscribe from mailing lists just gets you on more mailing lists, so if I unsubscribed once but now get different emails from the same company I just report spam and block.
Obviously since it's the holiday season a lot of those emails are trying to sell me something - some tangible object to give someone else, because capitalism. This is the time of year when I really see who all has my email address and I take advantage of it to try to get off as many lists as I can. But that left me wondering today, what are the lists I remain on selling me? And not just in the form of "buy this thing it's a perfect Xmas gift," but on a more subtle level. We "pay attention," so what am I buying with my attention? Sometimes I let lists slide if they don't send me things very often, but still, what are they peddling?
Being able to curate and control one's digital life is in many ways a great luxury. So my personal project over the next couple of days is looking more closely at what online entities are nickel-and-diming my attention. Yeah it takes less than a second to swipe away an unwanted email solicitation, but that's still time and cognition. So I bought some compression socks, or a cat drinking fountain, or a book, and I'm supposed to get email for the rest of my life? Mmmm, no.
And this isn't even beginning to get into the area of current events and attention. I think a lot of us are well aware of the fuckery that goes on with people trying to direct our attention to this or that, and away from this other thing.
I haven't reached any good conclusions here, but I need to get an eight-mile run today, and I want to do it while it's reasonably warm.
