Attention and commons

Like my previous blogs, I’ve struggled to finish typing sentences without being distracted by Facebook notifications or interesting YouTube videos. I get why some people deliberately cut themselves off the internet while doing an assignment but I fear my attention span is already too far gone after being exposed to the beauty that is the internet. This, including the readings, made me realise that social media and other websites have sought for the territory of our attention (Goldhaber 1997). Therefore through the internet, we have divided our attention with the different functions given to us by new media technologies.

First let’s look at attention. Due to the new media and publishing technologies, the world has entered an age of information overload. In fact we have “exceeded the capacity of information that we can absorb and retain” (Boyd 2010). If I wanted to learn about a particular event or skill through a ‘how to’ tutorial then I would simply type the keywords on Google and attain that information within seconds. However this information may not be retained for the long term and then we would have to search for the same thing again. This suggests that the internet has impaired our data retention and attention spans. Since we can only do so much with our time, businesses now perceive attention as a scarce resource (Goldhaber 1997).

The second concept in the readings studies commons. The commons allows people to share information and publish content in a public space. The internet provides the medium for the commons. It allows people to contribute their ideas in a much larger online community (Walljasper 2011). Those viewing the information could either consume the knowledge or add to the data that was published. Furthermore, the amount of collaborations that the internet allows gives way to new forms of publishing. Perhaps the greatest part of the internet is being able to publish and consume without any restrictions to the user. While I do believe that access to information should be available for everyone, where does the internet draw the line? News articles in the internet are free and peer to peer sharing is allowing artistic content to be free to the public. Should all information be common or should some become private? Regardless of the answer, more people are finding ways to share private information to the public, thanks to the internet.      

Through the study of attention, we can discover the nature of commons and the publics that use them.  As our attention spans have lessened, we have greater demands from the commons to have information that is easily absorbed. Due to the various information offered by the internet public knowledge and experiences become vastly different. Information is important to the public but I think that the problem with contemporary commons is that the public using the internet is becoming less engaged with information as it is so easily accessible.

References

Boyd, S. (2010). The False Question Of Attention Economics. [online] Stowe Boyd. Available at: http://stoweboyd.com/post/764818419/the-false-question-of-attention-economics [Accessed 30 Aug. 2014].

Goldhaber, M. (1997). Feature. [online] Archive.wired.com. Available at: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.12/es_attention.html [Accessed 30 Aug. 2014].

Walljasper, J. (2011). The Commons Moment is Now. [online] Common Dreams. Available at: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2011/01/24/commons-moment-now [Accessed 30 Aug. 2014].