How Your Attention is Stolen
The Decline of Reflective Thought and Self-Control in the Digital Age
We experience the externalities of the Attention Economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like 'annoying' or 'distracting.'
But this is a grave misreading of their nature.
In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do.
In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation...
by framersqool:
Why were the naked frauds marketed under cover of 'covid' panic such an easy sell? When confronted with an opportunity to 'work from home' or 'study online,' how much was anyone particularly bothered by the fact that this seeming opportunity, to spend entire days shooting up digital heroin for lack of any alternative, had come in the form of what amounted to varying degrees of martial law, forcing them to stay at home and thoroughly dismantle their external lives until further notice?
Blaming 'the government' for any of this is to put the cart before the horse in a quite comically ludicrous way: the horse dragging the 'covid' cart all along was the entire population of digital junkies, already long since disposed to prefer the compulsive stimulations of tech-narcotics to the much more challenging ones of actually living their lives within the physical space of their surroundings.
Who has been to blame for the excesses and pointlessness of the entire 'covid' orgy in mass conformism?
Who decided to buy that smartphone and make it the center of the known universe?
The herdsman is not to blame for cattle behaving like cattle.
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.