Rob Horning on Paying Attention

I’m supremely interested these days in scientific and cultural explorations of “focused attention”, and I’ve been meaning to gather more of this kind of article here. In this piece, Rob is commenting on this silly NYT Mag article which mocks attention science as unfounded, nostalgic hand-wringing. Rob always brings a smart po-mo sensibility to his posts and this one is no exception — distractibility and the swarm of micro-interruptions that intrude on our post-consumer consciousness, he posits, work in the favour of the media/commercial culture because prolonged concentration, to an advertiser, “registers as lost opportunities to make sales”. Worth a read, the whole thread.