Earlier in the chapter Rheingold did mention being able to train mindfulness without going through rigorous "attention training." One has to wonder, does the professor of mindfulness always practice what he preaches or did his earlier statement fall outside of the forty things he could attentively focus on by the time he got to this point in his writing?

After researching all of the people mentioned in this section, the most interesting seems to be Dr. Baron. American University has a faculty page for her and it states "Professor Baron is interested in language and technology, reading, the relationship between speech and writing, the history of English, and higher education. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, she has published eight books. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008. Her newest book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World, appeared in 2015." She has taught and done research at multiple universities including the Ivy League (Brown). One of the best interviews pertaining specifically to her research was on C-Span2 and is now on youtube. It is linked below and is about ten minutes long but is actually fairly interesting given that it is daytime public television programming.

In this a good point is made, social health can be ruined by too much online interaction and not enough in person social interaction. I urge you to learn more about this phenomena through a Ted Talk given by Sherry Turkle linked below (she is actually mentioned later on but I had seen this TED Talk prior to the reading).

Remove online from this statement entirely and the statement itself would still ring true with many philosophers and successful people in today's culture, however this distraction or lack of focus and attention has happened since the beginning of time. People aren't 100% consciously at fault for having quick attention shifting qualities. As nomads, a quick attention shift to something out of the field of immediate attention may be helpful for detecting a predator early enough to run or hide. It is only now in the age of advanced media that this shifting field of attention has become a "problem" as the internet facilitates time-sucking unproductive attention shifting, even if it is in the instinctive mold to be constantly alert to new or different stimuli hitting the brain. So instead of allowing the brain to be bombarded into submission by moving attention (or lack there of altogether) setting out with standards, goals, and a light at the end of the tunnel is one incentive to work with to help with mindfulness.

In talking about attention, Rheingold spends as much time articulating how little attention people with modern technology pay to their surroundings and indeed even the things that they are supposedly paying attention to. Have you ever witnessed a teenager on a cell phone walking and scrolling through Instagram or Snapchat much too quickly to actually consume any meaningful information from the platform? While this imaginary (yet very real) teenager is walking how many people do they almost run into? How many objects? How many times do they almost walk into busy intersections and in some cases walk right through them without a second thought? All of that to say when Rheingold talks about lack of attention through his 2012 lens he was still at the tip of the iceberg, five years removed it is only getting worse in terms of his favorite subject, lack of attention. The current pace of loss of mindfulness is almost unsustainable without some sort of referendum and in time that may come but until then expect a lot more stories like the one below to start entering the media, our imaginary teenager can only dodge so many bullets, or SUVs.

In fact there is no aid for this problem, no outside source that fixes all distractions in situations of great importance, but it does highlight a particularly attractive feature of being a more mindful person, the ability to accomplish tasks in an expedited manner because of the highly groomed filtering ability that a mindful person works years to develop.

This is an act of mindfulness most people can relate to, after almost messing up in a little way, the attentiveness and mindfulness to things that are much larger and demand more attention suddenly come into sharp focus. Usually this is associated with driving and almost hitting something but it can also be for smaller things that are taken for granted just as much like using scissors and almost cutting your hand or even not paying attention to things in a walking path and stubbing a toe on a piece of furniture. Little wake up calls like this happen to everyone and serve as big reminders that mindfulness is an important skill that most still have not mastered.

In this linked article there is a discourse on how to stop terrorists from recruiting through social media. This may seem unrelated at first but through repetition, Isis recruiters have learned how to identify a target and convert them into a member of the organization of hate they run. If these recruits were focused on and emulating social justice warriors dedicated to fighting Isis they might never have become part of the terrorist cell. The success of Isis in recruiting new members has to do with this "Narrative Network" Rheingold mentions. In highly oversimplified but rather poignant terms "Monkey see monkey do." The Isis recruiters train the brains of mainly young impressionable men to see and "mentally rehearse" actions that further the organizations agenda. In isolating these young men and only exposing them to one very powerful side of an even more powerful two sided argument they obtain new members and one of the key ways to combat that as mentioned in the article is to destroy that isolated state, or as Rheingold might put it to change or expand the narrative network of the minds of the people Isis tries to recruit.

To simplify this example, in order to find the keys, the brain doesn't use a visual memory of you placing the keys somewhere. Instead your brain uses the are and spaces around it "spatial awareness" and pieces together the location based on things like how high your hand was when the keys were dropped or what sort of feeling did the surface have when grazing your knuckle against it while walking away. This is why when searching for things (i.e. keys) many people hold out their arm while looking, because the height that their arm is held is going to be at a similar height to the keys because their spatial memory is telling the arm what height to search at.

In his focus on attention, Rheingold also touches many times on media consumption manners and the collective societal responsibility to consume and manage habits of consumption to acceptable times and settings. For example watching cat videos instead of working is generally not an acceptable form of media consumption. This chapter was written in 2012, in the past five years societies media consumption has gone from bad to worse, people are more distracted than ever and that distraction is happening at less and less opportune times as time goes on. So in his speaking on media attention, focus also on Rheingold's underlying message of socially responsible media consumption.