This is a lovely piece from L. M. Sacasas on the limitations of digital literacy initiatives, tending as they do to abstract the intellectual problem of reliable truth-seeking practices from the moral problem of being committed to seeking that truth under conditions which make it difficult. In this sense, he’s arguing that virtue is something which the platform ecosystem requires of it as we try and flourish within and through the field of temptation it presents us with.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
This extract from Tim Wu’s Attention Merchants pg 192-193 makes clear how the immersive character of video games has been treated as addictive from the outset. It raises the question of where the former characteristic ends and the latter begins: In both markets Space Invaders was a sudden and unexpected […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I’m not a fan of The End of Absence by Michael Harris but I love this term. From pg 216: The experience of one person’s distraction compounding another’s. Julie kept texting while I was talking about my cat, so I started texting, too. Existing in two varietals: “limited compound distraction” refers […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
From The Distraction Addiction by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: It amazes me how often during a single (admittedly rather trivial) thought my mind wants to veer off onto these other paths, pick up this idea and that one, answer this or that question – and how easy the web lets me satisfy that […]
Estimated reading time: 50 seconds
