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ARCHIVED CONTENT
You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Editor’s Note: An excellent extract with eDiscovery applicability from an article by James Williams, the author of the book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (Cambridge University Press).
Extract from article by James Williams as published in The Guardian
The new challenges we face in the Age of Attention are, on both individual and collective levels, challenges of self-regulation. Having some limits is inevitable in human life. In fact, limits are necessary if we are to have any freedom at all.
Digital technologies have transformed our experiential world into a never-ending flow of potential informational rewards. They’ve become the playing field on which everything now competes for our attention. Similar to economic abundance, “if these rewards arrive faster than the disciplines of prudence can form, then self-control will decline with affluence: the affluent (with everyone else) will become less prudent” (as Avner Offer writes in The Challenge of Affluence).
In a sense, information abundance requires us to invert our understanding of what “information technologies” do: rather than overcoming barriers in the world, they increasingly exist to help us put barriers in place. The headphone manufacturer Bose now sells a product called Hearphones that allows the user to block out all sounds in their environment except the ones coming from their desired source – to focus on a conversation in a loud room, for example. The product’s website reads: “Focus on the voices you want to hear – and filter out the noises you don’t – so you can comfortably hear every word. From now on, how you hear is up to you.” We could also read this tagline as a fitting description of the new challenges in the Age of Attention as a whole.
The increasing rate of technological change further amplifies these challenges of attention and self-regulation.
Read the complete article at Technology is driving us to distraction
Additional Reading:
- Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Technology-Assisted Review (Part One)
- Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Technology-Assisted Review (Part Two)