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March 02, 2006
Achtung!
Analee Newitz has a piece over at Alternet about our attention.In brief: Attention works opposite from money. With money, we consume, companies produce. With attention, we produce and companies consume -- and companies pay a lot of money to consume our attention.
I read the article at work in between stories. I looked around at my screen. I had 12 tabs open on Mozilla; I was monitoring five different e-mail addresses; I had two Explorer windows open; FTP client; HTML editor; photo editor; an instant messaging program with three conversations.
Five seconds -- good, solid, focused seconds -- of my time is worth hundreds of dollars to someone.
We have grown into a culture that is so overboard with multi-tasking -- especially with our media -- that we have trouble focusing on any one thing.
Case in point: Right now, I'm writing this entry, referring to Newitz's article in another window, monitoring the 'Cuse game, and keeping tabs on five e-mail accounts. And the television is on. It's a light night here at Casa Josh.
Next time you're having trouble finishing something -- or starting something -- take a look around at what you're doing. There might be so much noise going on that you can't possibly expect to get anything done.
Oh, and take some time to read that piece, will you?
Posted by josh at March 2, 2006 10:04 PM
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