“Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat.” The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar, he said, might be happening with the changes in our attention.
Johann Hari believes we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds and I definitely agree. I've felt this theft of my attention too.
They're deliberately creating TV content as a background to people's phone addiction now.
It’s O.K. to look at your phone all the time, the show seems to say, because Emily does it, too. The episodic plots are too thin to ever be confusing; when you glance back up at the television, chances are that you’ll find tracking shots of the Seine or cobblestoned alleyways, lovely but meaningless.
Fantastic article by Craig Mod on the implicit contracts we enter into when giving our attention to digital media. He refers to this as a lack of edges which is the best description I've seen of the issue to date. Read it.
