Tuesday January 02, 2007
Tuesday January 02, 2007 Below I've copied a post by Gary Frost in response to an IF: Book blog entry termed, Future of the Filter. The metaphor Frost employs in his second paragraph is, to me, wonderful and I think he raises a very good point about the increasing pressure to filter relentless streams of new content (or what filters the filters?). There is only so much to which anyone can pay mind to before a deficit of meaningful and sustained attention, much less thoughtful response, occurs. These discussions are part of a larger school of thought termed the attention economy. Other articles that I've recently perused on the subject are a First Monday article and a cogent interview with Richard Lanham, author of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (thanks to Keith Morgan for that one).
From Gary Frost:
When I was growing up there was only one broadcast TV channel in
Chicago. I believe it was only on three hours each evening. After the
broadcast we would sit in the dark watching the test pattern. Now there
are many more channels but the capacity of our visual attention to a
single screen has not multiplied as well.
One way to visualize the multiplicity of content now presented is to
imagine a circular kaleidoscopic view with content continuously
advancing inward from the perimeter. In this metaphor content
dissipates as it migrates to the center until only a single channel is
apparent at the very center. This metaphor represents the experience
and the attention of the bionic reader. Given such visualization it is
curious that the choices are not limitless but only two; either persist
focus on the resolved channel or supplant it with another.
It's the increasingly short cycle time for the choices at the end that are really at the heart of the matter. Is there such a thing as a "Planck time" for attention, which once we drop below that threshold choices as represented by the ability to understand what we are choosing to view and more importantly, why, become essentially meaningless? That's an extreme and perhaps reductionist statement, but still I wonder. As I read things like this and the other articles above, some of the questions I'm trying to keep in the back of my head are imagine a circular kaleidoscopic view with content continuously
advancing inward from the perimeter. In this metaphor content
dissipates as it migrates to the center until only a single channel is
apparent at the very center. This metaphor represents the experience
and the attention of the bionic reader. Given such visualization it is
curious that the choices are not limitless but only two; either persist
focus on the resolved channel or supplant it with another.
1)what are the ramifications for us as librarians in creating learning spaces, both virtual and real, that will enable focused attention for learning, not merely disperse it further; and
2) how does one gain attention for collections in an increasingly (and wonder of wonders this is not a contradiction) diasporic and dense information space?
Posted by WARREN, SCOTT | Jan 02 2007, 04:23:42 PM EST | Permalink |
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