WhileWereBothRunningD. Graham Burnett traces today's attention crisis back to WWI "pursuit tests": multi-stimulus rigs that measured how well aviators could track 14 lights, a motor, and an amp meter simultaneously.
The inversion: we don't have an attention deficit. We have an attention surplus of the wrong kind. Our cybernetic attention (tracking, clicking, responding to machine stimuli) is sublime. It's our human attention (daydreaming, being present, reading uninterrupted) that's disappearing.
An ethnographer from Mars would think we're attentional champions. We stare at screens all day.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/cybernetic-attention/
#attention #cybernetics #technology #history #PublicDomainReview
The inversion: we don't have an attention deficit. We have an attention surplus of the wrong kind. Our cybernetic attention (tracking, clicking, responding to machine stimuli) is sublime. It's our human attention (daydreaming, being present, reading uninterrupted) that's disappearing.
An ethnographer from Mars would think we're attentional champions. We stare at screens all day.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/cybernetic-attention/
#attention #cybernetics #technology #history #PublicDomainReview
Cybernetic Attention: All Watched over by Machines We Learned to Watch
Before the attention economy consumed our lives, “pursuit tests” devised by the US military coupled man to machine with the aim of assessing focus under pressure. D. Graham Burnett explores these devices for evaluating aviators, finding a pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings.
Le fractal