摘抄

0813
Every instant of every day we are bombarded with information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.

0819
The very word “propaganda” originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith.

Any communication is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some “stereotype” held by the mind.

In most areas of life, we necessarily rely on others for the presentation of facts and ultimately choose between manufactured alternatives, whether it is our evaluation of a product or a political proposition. And if that is true, in the battle for our attention, there is a particular importance in who gets there first or most often. The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

hose who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.

0821
Since the time the serpent in the Garden of Eden influenced Eve and Eve in turn persuaded Adam, the world has tried to find out ways and means of controlling human behavior. In advertising, we call the process selling.

Through its variously “scientific” techniques like demand engineering, branding, or targeting, the advertising industry had become an increasingly efficient engine for converting attention into revenue.

0825
Information cannot be acted upon without attention and thus attention capture and information are essential to a functioning market economy, or indeed any competitive process, like an election (unknown candidates do not win). So as a technology for gaining access to the human mind, advertising can therefore serve a vital function, making markets, elections, and everything that depends on informed choice operate better, by telling us what we need to know about our choices, ideally in an objective fashion.

For the advertisers, by far the most valuable function of advertising, then, is the shaping or creation of demands that would not otherwise exist.

The most effective brand advertising, after all, does not try to convince you to make a choice, but rather to convince you that there is no choice.

0826
The invention of “Prime time” — the attentional habit of turning on the radio (later, the television) at the designated hour each and every evening of the year — was a momentous cultural as well as commercial innovation at a point when the two categories were drifting steadily closer. For it transformed not only the industries equipped to capture attention, but also the lives of those whose attention was now there for the taking. We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to—how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience.

Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

The attention merchants would rely on the power of entertainment to weld audiences into a saleable product.

The attention merchant’s business model was always a bit sinister and easily misunderstood.

0828
For by testing the extremes of what attention capture could accomplish, the Third Reich1 obliges us to confront directly the relationship between what we pay attention to and our individual freedom.

If to pay attention is to open the mind to information, to do so in an animated crowd is to fling the doors wide open. To be exposed to any information is to be influenced, but in crowds the possibilities go well beyond everyday experience. Gustave Le Bon, the first theorist of crowd psychology, held that it is loss of individual responsibility that makes the individual in the crowd more malleable. Freud would say that the superego was supplanted by the will of the crowd, as unconscious wishes rise to the surface and are shared.

Freedom might be said to describe not only the size of our “option set” but also our awareness of what options there are.

0829
It is all the same, insofar as everything that captures it enters our mind the same way. But there are differences in quality of attention. The most basic dividing line is likely between transitory and sustained attention, the former quick, superficial, and often involuntarily provoked; the latter, deep, long-lasting, and voluntary. What matters for present purposes is that selling us things relies mainly on the former—on which the attention merchant thrives—but our happiness depends on balancing the two.

The purpose of advertising is never merely to inform but existed to “manipulate human motivations and desires and develop a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar — perhaps even un-desirous of purchasing.”

0901
Great tech oaks have always grown from little acorns.

Consent is not always a simple matter, legally or philosophically. And willpower always figures into the complications.

The successful philosophers were also advertisers who could sell their new models of the universe to large numbers of others, thus converting thought to action, mind to matter.

Desire’s most natural endpoint is consumption.

If you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.

As a mode of production, capitalism is a perfect chameleon; it has no disabling convictions but profit and so can cater to any desire, even those inimical to it.

0902
Technology always embodies ideology, and the ideology in question was one of difference, recognition, and individuality. But commerce bows to none, taking its opportunities wherever they may lie.

When you think of it, channel surfing, or grazing, is a bizarre way to spend your time and attention.

0904
If email perhaps saved the Internet from a premature death, it also foretold its eventual significance. Its technical achievement would always remain the connection of different networks into one universal net. But its lasting importance to the individual would be the ability it conferred on him to connect with virtually anyone, whether for business, social reasons, or whatever else. As the content of those connections proved to be nothing less than astonishing in its potential variety, the Internet would begin devouring human attention.

The check-in would eventually become a widespread attentional habit.

Over the 1930s, a more famous scientist, B. F. Skinner, regarded free will to be an illusion and argued that our behavior is a fabric of responses to past stimuli, in particular the rewards or punishments that any behavior attracts. Understood this way, all animal behavior developed through a learning process he called “operant conditioning,” whereby some actions are reinforced by positive consequences (rewards), others discouraged by negative ones (punishments).

0905
The first great harvester of human attention, it must never be forgotten, was religion.

The very expression “celebrity worship” may seem a figurative exaggeration; but insofar as intensity and duration of attention can separate devotion from other motivations, it would be hard to argue that what we have seen in our culture is anything less than an apotheosis.

Celebrities were becoming attention merchants in their own right.

0917
In retrospect, the first wave of bloggers and their fellow travelers can be likened to a first wave of visitors to some desert island, who erect crude, charming hostels and serve whatever customers come their way, and marvel at the paradise they’ve discovered. As in nature, so, too, on the web: the tourist traps high and low are soon to follow; commercial exploitation is on its way. Such, unfortunately, is the nature of things.

0918
Technology doesn’t follow culture so much as culture follows technology. New forms of expression naturally arise from new media, but so do new sensibilities and new behaviors.

This is life now: one constant, never-ending stream of non sequiturs and self-referential garbage that passes in through our eyes and out of our brains at the speed of a touchscreen.

When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.

every sliver of our attention is fair game for commercial exploitation

The past half century has been an age of unprecedented individualism, allowing us to live in all sorts of ways that were not possible before. The power we have been given to construct our attentional lives is an underappreciated example. Even while waiting for the dentist, we have the world at our finger tips: we can check mail, browse our favorite sites, play games, and watch movies, where once we had to content ourselves with a stack of old magazines. But with the new horizon of possibilities has also come the erosion of private life’s perimeter. And so it is a bit of a paradox that in having so thoroughly individualized our attentional lives we should wind up being less ourselves and more in thrall to our various media and devices. Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime. If there is to be some scheme of zoning to stem this sprawl, it will need to be mostly an act of will on the part of the individual.

Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to.