Lawrence Levine<br /> The Opening of the American Mind (1996)<br /> note the coverage of "how our memory should function"

A 'typewriter rebellion' is underway. Here's what that means and why it's attracting kids from 2024-04-15 from Joe Dana / 12 News / Phoenix, AZ

Since 1908 there's also been the move towards small digestible social media which increases the dial on repetition and duplication, but the sense of flow created by dopamine hits to be found in the attention economy make these difficult things to overcome.

There is a range of reading lengths and levels of argumentation which can be found in these various ranges.

Some will complain about the death of books or the rise of articles or the rise of social media and the attention economy. Where is balance to be found.

Kaiser speaks to these issues in ¶75-79. One must wonder what Kaiser would have thought about the bite-sized nature of social media and it's distracting nature?

Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.

ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma

The pushing of the attention economy broadly prevents society from facing its most important problems. We're constantly distracted and are ultimately unable to focus on what is really important.

reply to u/bestlunchtoday at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12gadut/benefits_of_sharing_permanent_notes/

I love the diversity of ideas here! So many different ways to do it all and perspectives on the pros/cons. It's all incredibly idiosyncratic, just like our notes.

I probably default to a far extreme of sharing the vast majority of my notes openly to the public (at least the ones taken digitally which account for probably 95%). You can find them here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich.

Not many people notice or care, but I do know that a small handful follow and occasionally reply to them or email me questions. One or two people actually subscribe to them via RSS, and at least one has said that they know more about me, what I'm reading, what I'm interested in, and who I am by reading these over time. (I also personally follow a handful of people and tags there myself.) Some have remarked at how they appreciate watching my notes over time and then seeing the longer writing pieces they were integrated into. Some novice note takers have mentioned how much they appreciate being able to watch such a process of note taking turned into composition as examples which they might follow. Some just like a particular niche topic and follow it as a tag (so if you were interested in zettelkasten perhaps?) Why should I hide my conversation with the authors I read, or with my own zettelkasten unless it really needed to be private? Couldn't/shouldn't it all be part of "The Great Conversation"? The tougher part may be having means of appropriately focusing on and sharing this conversation without some of the ills and attention economy practices which plague the social space presently.

There are a few notes here on this post that talk about social media and how this plays a role in making them public or not. I suppose that if I were putting it all on a popular platform like Twitter or Instagram then the use of the notes would be or could be considered more performative. Since mine are on what I would call a very quiet pseudo-social network, but one specifically intended for note taking, they tend to be far less performative in nature and the majority of the focus is solely on what I want to make and use them for. I have the opportunity and ability to make some private and occasionally do so. Perhaps if the traffic and notice of them became more prominent I would change my habits, but generally it has been a net positive to have put my sensemaking out into the public, though I will admit that I have a lot of privilege to be able to do so.

Of course for those who just want my longer form stuff, there's a website/blog for that, though personally I think all the fun ideas at the bleeding edge are in my notes.

Since some (u/deafpolygon, u/Magnifico99, and u/thiefspy; cc: u/FastSascha, u/A_Dull_Significance) have mentioned social media, Instagram, and journalists, I'll share a relevant old note with an example, which is also simultaneously an example of the benefit of having public notes to be able to point at, which u/PantsMcFail2 also does here with one of Andy Matuschak's public notes:

[Prominent] Journalist John Dickerson indicates that he uses Instagram as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ here he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of annotations he makes in books.

It's reasonably well known that Ronald Reagan shared some of his personal notes and collected quotations with his speechwriting staff while he was President. I would say that this and other similar examples of collaborative zettelkasten or collaborative note taking and their uses would blunt u/deafpolygon's argument that shared notes (online or otherwise) are either just (or only) a wiki. The forms are somewhat similar, but not all exactly the same. I suspect others could add to these examples.

And of course if you've been following along with all of my links, you'll have found yourself reading not only these words here, but also reading some of a directed conversation with entry points into my own personal zettelkasten, which you can also query as you like. I hope it has helped to increase the depth and level of the conversation, should you choose to enter into it. It's an open enough one that folks can pick and choose their own path through it as their interests dictate.

• claim researched =
• beauty determines how we perceive the world because beauty binds looks
• this is relevant for understanding how to focus people's attention

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/mary-olivers-poetry-captures-our-relationship-technology/589039/

In the attention economy, social media is the equivalent of fast food. Just like going out for fine dining or even healthier gourmet cooking at home, we need to make the time and effort to consume higher quality information sources. Books, journal articles, and longer forms of content with more editorial and review which take time and effort to produce are better choices.

and willpower, or, if you like, ego. It is well known that decision-making is one of the most tiring and wearying tasks...

Having a standardized and reliable working environment or even workflow can be less taxing on our attention, our concentration, and our willpower leaving more energy for making decisions and thinking which can have a greater impact.

Does the fact that the relative lack of any decision making about what to see or read next seen in doomscrolling underlie some of the easily formed habit of the attention economy? Not having to actively decide what to read next combined with the random rewards of interesting tidbits creating a sense of flow is sapping not our mental energy, but our time. How can we better design against this?

This is a whole new sort of "attention economy".

This genre of problem is also one of the most common defenses given by the accused as sort of "boogeyman" meant to silence accusers. How could we better balance the ills against each of the sides in these cases to mitigate the broader harms in both directions?

https://slate.com/culture/2011/08/cathy-n-davidson-s-now-you-see-it-do-the-young-really-rule-in-the-internet-era.html

A very prescient article by Annie Murphy Paul from 2011. It doesn't review Davidson's book, so much as to take to task some of the underlying optimistic views of the magic of technology. If only we were able to better adapt and evolve to create the sort of changes in humanity to take advantage of the potential benefits that were assumed. Instead, much of the tech sector adapted instead to hijack our slowly evolving attention to benefit themselves.

I wish we as a culture had had more of this sober sort of outlook about technology at the time.

I'm now even more intrigued by Paul's new book: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, which is already in my reading queue.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Annie Murphy Paul </span> in "@ChrisAldrich @amandalicastro @CathyNDavidson Chris, you may be interested in this review of "Now You See It" that I wrote . . . https://t.co/TnnbQ3NHWf" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>10/17/2021 10:25:52</time>)</cite></small>

Very prescient for 2011!

Attention to Intention

Resonance with the topic for the next World Weavers group conversation on Saturday, October 23: Shifting from an attention economy to an intention economy.

On Saturday, October 9, after our World Weavers conversation on the topic Matter is Derivative of Consciousness, I was exploring Value Village, a thrift store in Chilliwack, with my wife, Jayne. I came across a book that fits with the theme for our World Weavers conversation on October 23: Shifting from an attention economy to an intention economy.

Sacred Economics

By Charles Eisenstein

Sacred money, then, will be a medium of giving, a means to imbue the global economy with the spirit of the gift that governed tribal and village cultures, and still does today wherever people do things for each other outside the money economy.

Sacred Economics describes this future and also maps out a practical way to get there. Long ago I grew tired of reading books that criticized some aspect of our society without offering a positive alternative. Then I grew tired of books that offered a positive alternative that seemed impossible to reach: “We must reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent.” Then I grew tired of books that offered a plausible means of reaching it but did not describe what I personally, could do to create it. Sacred Economics operates on all four levels: it offers a fundamental analysis of what has gone wrong with money; it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy; it explains the collective actions necessary to create that world and the means by which these actions come about; and it explores the personal dimensions of the world-transformation, the change in identity and being that I call “living in the gift.”

(Page XIX)

A very early statement about what was about to become the "attention economy"

This is a terrifically painful and harmful thing. How can we redesign a system that doesn't function this way?

Kozyreva, A., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2019, December 4). Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ky4x8