Hayden Mills
http://haydmills.com
“When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
“The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.”
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
“It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase ''homo distractus,'' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.”
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
“As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
“We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our ''automatic'' attention as opposed to our ''controlled'' attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience's baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant-just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.”
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
― The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
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