"We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to - how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambiance. When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we're often speaking too broadly of our city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, having received or taken it. As William James once put it, 'My experience is what I agree to attend to.'"
Quoting a journalist in London from the US during WW2: "The journalistic approach, while objective, is not neutral."
"Video games also consumed something else, human attention, in a way that was both old and new at the same time. As in any real game--be it tennis, pinball, or blackjack--the fast-flowing stimuli constantly engage the visual cortex, which reacts automatically to movement. No intentional focus is required, which explains why children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder find the action of video games as engrossing as anyone else." Hm, interesting.
"In retrospect, the word 'remote control' was ultimately a misnomer. What it finally did was to empower the more impulsive circuits of the brain in their conflict with executive faculties, the parts with which we think we control ourselves and act rationally. It did this by making it almost effortless, practically nonvolitional, to redirect our attention--the brain had only to send one simple command to the finger in response to a cascade of involuntary cues. In fact, in the course of sustained channel surfing, the voluntary aspect of attention control may disappear entirely. The channel surfer is then in a mental state not unlike that of a newborn or a reptile. Having thus surrendered, the mind is simply jumping about and following whatever grabs it.
"All this leads ot a highly counterintuitive point: technologies designed to increase our control over our attention will sometimes have the very opposite effect. They open us up to a stream of instinctive selections, and tiny reward,s the sum of which may be no reward at all. And despite the complaints of the advertising industry, a state of distracted wandering is not really a bad one for attention merchants; it was far better than being ignored."
"Perhaps a century of the ascendant self of the self's progressive liberation from any trammels not explicitly conceived to protect other selves, perhaps this progression, then wedded to the magic of technology serving not the state or even the corporation but the individual ego, perhaps it could reach no other logical endpoint, but the self as its own object of worship.
"Of course, it is easy to denigrate as vanity even harmless forms of self-expression. Indulging in a bit of self-centeredness from time to time, playing with the trappings of fame, can be a form of entertainment for oneself and one's friends, especially when undertaken with a sense of irony. Certainly, too, the self-portrait, and the even more patently ludicrous invention, the selfie stick, has become too easy a target for charges of self-involvement. Humans, after all, have sought the admiration of others in various ways since the dawn of time; it is a feature of our social and sexual natures. The desire of men and women to dress up and parade may be as deeply rooted as the peacock's impulse to strut. Like all attention harvesters, INstagram has not stirred a new yearning within us, merely acted upon one already there, and facilitated its gratification to an unimaginable extent. Therein lies the real problem.
"Technology doesn't follow culture so much as culture follows technology. New forms of expression naturally arise from new media, but so do new sensibilities and new behaviors."
Tim Wu has undertaken a sweeping history of the harvesting and selling of attention for profit, from the earliest advertisements for snake oil, to the enveloping of behavior psychology's insights in marketing, to now big tech and social media simultaneously holding and fragmenting our attention. All along the way, we see that, as Wu says, "Technology doesn't follow culture so much as culture follows technology." I found it haunting.
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