Jordan points at this thread, concerning the information boom's increasing demands on the resource of human attention.
It's a perverse spectacle: ideology distilled so finely that it appears as a sort of madness. After identifying technology as the source of these spiralling attention-demands (we all have too many RSS feeds! please help us!) the only thing that the threaders can imagine is some new technology that manages the information better for us ("personalizing" filters are popular fantasy).
One doesn't wish to see indulged the dream of somehow abandoning technology, retrogressing to some moment of pastoral peace (that never existed; a side-oddity of this discussion is that no one ever points out its enduring popularity: speed of the world, mechanized shattering of organically whole consciousness, tell it to Wordsworth, de Quincey, etc. Why, it's enough to make one sympathetic to Marinetti!)
But perhaps there could be something other than the modeling of what it means to have impassable horizons of thought — perhaps someone could offer the plain insight that, say, the demands which seem to be made by technology are rather made by human institutions with powerful interests, and that these interests in turn will remain, inextricable and determinate, in next iterations? "Mystification," anyone? What can't be thought at any cost: that the "technology," the object, isn't a thing with interests of its own, but a relation among people, and that if the nature of that relation isn't changed, the objects won't do it on their own.
This particular example is compelling is its clarity: almost immediately, the comment box starts to fill with notes from people hawking their software to solve this attention problem, or usefully directing readers to essays about how companies can gain competitive advantage by catering to the concerns of the attention-short. Yes, I am quite certain that this problem, of the consciousness overburdened by demands not its own, can be addressed in such manner, and is in no way a result of such pursuits.
It's a bit like watching an animal in a lucite box that's concluded its blood is being sucked and, certain that it can reach all the possible solutions, nonetheless decides again and again to address the problem with a Crazy Straw. And the straw vendors keep sending helpful suggestions...
Posted by jane at November 2, 2005 07:24 AM | TrackBack