In this digital world, your attention, once in abundant supply, has become SEX increasingly scarce.
Now, what did you take away from that sentence? Was it the thesis to this program? Or was it something else? You, my dear student, are going to need to study attention economics.
In this age we are surrounded by stimuli, messages in our environment clamoring for a little piece of our awareness. Advertisements are designed and sold with the simple premise of stealing one small mote of your attention. Your technological devices, designed to assist you in your life and work, beep incessantly with updates, alerts, and alarms. Cars become more and more like the cockpits of fighter planes with their heads-up displays and data readouts. Even our relationships take more maintenance; lovers separated by such a small obstacle as a day at the office stay in constant contact through email, instant messaging, and social networks. In our new digital world we’ve finally started to run out of one of our most precious resources: Our own attention.
In the distant past, educated people worked for decades to train their brains to retain information. Greek bards had to be able to recall the story and rhythm of, if not the exact words of, either of Homer’s epics at the drop of an Athenian dime. Monastery-confined monks would construct vast “memory palaces” in their minds to store and recall data in photographic detail. Starting with paper and pen, technological advances began to make that sort of rigorous mental dexterity obsolete. But in our rush to modernity, have we gone too far? Have we given over too much of our brainpower to the devices built to boost our productivity? Are our brains now just tasty mush for our zombie progeny?
To survive, we’re going to need a whole new brain:
- MULTITASKING: How do you pursue four tasks at once? What lessons can you learn from your parallel-processing possessions?
- AMBIENT CONSUMPTION: In a world awash with information, how can you consume and derive value from the cloud? How do you become a great blue whale, sucking informational krill through your massive maw?
- FOCUS: What do you do when it’s time to not multitask? How do you stay laser-focused in a world of distractions?
- STILLNESS: And lastly, but most importantly—how do you turn it all off? Massive parallel input of interesting information at hyper-speed is addictive—but your brain needs rest. Learning to be still brings not only the mental discipline necessary for proper focus, but also the opportunity for that rare insight or intuition beyond your day-to-day productivity. There are signals you need to hear that won’t come through your phone or email and it’s easy to deafen yourself with information overload.
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