Attention is the Fundamental Literacy
Attention is the fundamental literacy. Every second I spend online, I make decisions about where to spend my attention. Should I devote any mindshare at all to this comment or that headline? — a question I need to answer each time an attractive link catches my eye. Simply becoming aware of the fact that life online requires this kind of decision-making was my first step in learning to tune a fundamental filter on what I allow into my head — a filter that is under my control only if I practice controlling it. The second level of decision-making is whether I want to open a tab on my browser because I decided that this item will be worth my time tomorrow. The third decision: do I bookmark this site because I am interested in the subject and might want to reference it at some unspecified future time? Online attention-taming begins with what meditators call “mindfulness” — the simple, self-influencing awareness of how attention wanders.
Notes:
Life online requires properly allocating our attention to maximize our productivity.
Folksonomies: culture internet technology society literacy attention
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/religion and spirituality/buddhism (0.486231)
/society/welfare (0.423740)
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Concepts:
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Psychology (0.947909): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Decision making (0.823810): dbpedia | freebase
Need (0.789153): freebase | dbpedia
Want (0.785048): dbpedia | freebase
Consciousness (0.770388): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Neuropsychological assessment (0.593436): dbpedia | freebase
WANT (0.560700): geo | website | yago
Attention is the Fundamental LiteracyTriples
Perspectives on Online Attention
Attention is the Fundamental Literacy > Comparison > Smaller Fragments of Information Command AttentionKevin Kelly and Howard Rheingold discuss managing their attention spans in the online world.
Schemas
Mental Discipline
Memes on mental discipline, from fictional characters to scientific virtues.
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