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Yo - Pay Attention!
For centuries, we saw information as something valuable, something worth paying for; we subscribed to the newspaper, read the ad, bought the movie ticket. But very soon, people may not even be able to give data away.
Buying attention is already an accepted part of doing business, says a new book called The Attention Economy, especially on "a planet with over five hundred TV channels and a trillion Web pages." Attention-getting and screening are becoming a profession all of its own.
Already, search engines like AltaVista can exchange favorable placement in search results for a fee. And publishers have paid Amazon for years for prominent attention of new books (they also pay book chains for placement of new books up front.). It's not hard to imagine a publisher paying a subscriber $50 to get their magazine for two years, rather than the other way around. They would still charge for ads, but ensure a steady subscription base. The attention crisis is becoming so severe that people will have to be paid to receive information. Davenport and Beck suggest this is, to some degree, inevitable.
It's no accident that we're the first society to develop widespread ADD. The controversies shrouding this disorder aside, the very idea would have seemed absurd in the pre-electronic, pre-digital era. It was boredom and ignorance that was epidemic. This is a culture drowning in instant, overwhelming information; losing its ability to figure out what, if anything, to pay attention to. We live in an Attention Economy, with forces on both sides -- sellers and transmitters, consumers and buyers -- struggling over how to manage attention.
The risks of not managing attention are enormous, as countless dot.coms, like traditional businesses before them, have recently learned. Educational institutions know, whether they admit it or not, that many of their students are paying less attention to their curriculums. Citizens pay less attention all the time to civics and voting. Media consumers spend less time reading papers, magazines, watching the evening news. Companies spend billions to design elaborate marketing strategies simply to get consumers to recognize their names, let alone believe their message or buy their products.
It's an increasingly difficult mission. Over the past generation, the amount of electronic information available to everyone has exploded. Executives and managers in particular get bombarded by much more data than they can possibly organize or use. Ditto for consumers, who flounder through sites and databases that sell and rate consumer goods, offer medical and legal information, facilitate research of almost every conceivable kind.
In fact, some information scholars -- like Thomas H. Davenport, director of the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change and John C. Beck of the UCLA's Anderson School of Management -- believe that the new currency of business is creating products and environments that understand the attention span of contemporary humans -- especially those in cyberspace -- and can get them to focus on data.
"Both on the Internet and in more traditional media like television, viewer attention is exchanged for money thousands of times a day," write Davenport and Beck in "The Attention Economy: A New Perspective on Business," published by the Harvard University Press. "Anyone who wants to sell something or persuade someone to do something has to invest in the attention markets. If I want the attention of a large group of customers, I try to get it by paying to monopolize their TV screens, Web pages, mailboxes, and ultimately their brains."
This issue goes way beyond business, though, and getting people's attention is increasingly tough to do. Attention has psychological and bio-chemical limits, and the hype culture is bombarding people with images and messages all of the time. The competition for attention grows daily, even though we only have so much attention to go around. Even the rare boss who gets 100 percent of her employees' attention will fail if she -- or her employees -- can't secure her customers' attention as well.
The authors offer some inventive ideas about managing attention. Education, they predict, will adopt briefer, more varied learning experiences, instead of the traditional lectures that "numb the brain's of today's students." A classroom, they suggest, might be outfitted with a panel of lights at the teacher's workstation, one light corresponding to each student's seat. When brain wave monitors not that a student is paying attention, his light will be green. If the student's attention lags and the light goes red, the teacher can engage the student by asking a question, focusing his voice in the student's direction, or using high-tech graphics or other tools. (This gives one pause, given the post-Columbine hysteria. In U.S. schools, teachers would probably zap kids who were bored rather than challenge them.)
Business will also have to radically alter their existing practices and methods. Since people pay attention most to things they develop and "own," companies have to start including consumers in the decision process at every stage.
Advertisers and other Net business entities are already finding that the "free cash and prizes just for looking at our ad or Web site" tactic is becoming obsolete. Those eyeballs have to be converted to names, subscriptions or memberships, credit card numbers.
Politicians, increasingly frustrated by more entertaining competition for citizen attention, turn to negative advertising or sensational accusations. Once-serious media organizations increasingly focus on scandal, weather and pet stories to gain market share and individual attention. Jerry Springer has always understood how to get people to focus.
So how do you get people to pay attention? By learning individual users' needs, demographics, insights, buying habits, responses to Web design; by hearing their complaints and kudos. Online advertising has to engage the viewer before it can lead to behavior change.
Pop-up ads annoy the hell out of a lot of online users, but they're impossible to ignore, while spam is not only simple to ignore, but something many consumers don't want to reward or encourage. Ads that feature the interests of the user and offer them services that are genuine and necessary are even better.
Anybody who's spent time online in the past few years doesn't need to be told that younger, wired Americans have different attention spans than their elders. They find conventional classroom formats suffocating. They zap away from commercials and mindless programming.They skip from website to website, write messages and chat responses that seem relentlessly shorter and faster; they're almost allergic to the bombardment of warnings, messages and exhortations that pass for news in our media.
Yet even the young are snareable. Personalization -- information that seems created for them alone -- is one way to compel attention. When a message's context is personalized, relating to a group the receiver belongs to or is interested in, or related to a question he or she is concerned about, the messages are often perceived as trustworthy or respected, influential or powerful, charismatic or appealing.
As for the recipient, according to Davenport and Beck, he or she is emotionally moved by the message, able to consider its meaning and implications, convinced that the message is important.
But most communications meet few, if any, of these criteria, so few people pay much attention to the overwhelming majority of messages they receive, often generated at enormous cost to wasteful affect.
That makes Attention Consciousness a hot new field in business, culture, education and politics. Politicians, CEO's, and Web designers who figure out how to incorporate attention-getting principles into their work are likely to prosper. But people and companies who indiscriminately send data out into the ether are wasting their money and our time. They are the next business casualties of the 21st Century.
Clearly, more information will require more delegation. Attention-sorting services will likely be in great demand as consumers look for help in organizing the tidal wave of information pouring over them.
But trading attention for free goods and services -- a favorite tactic of many first generation Net businesses -- is a devil's bargain. If attention is a scarce commodity, people will quickly realize that they shouldn't trade it away lightly. The trend of more information for competing for less attention can't go on indefinitely. The laws of physics and science dictate that people will ultimately begin to withdraw from the stress and complexity of an attention-devouring universe. Information providers will have to focus on quality, not quantity. People will seek respite from and alternatives to Hyperreality, the state fueled by too much media and data. The world may actually calm down, become quieter. The very rich will be able to live in attention-conservation zones, the authors say, and ordinary people will vacation in environments in which their attention can be devoted solely to people and things they love and enjoy.
In the end, the greatest prize for being able to capture attention will be the freedom to avoid it.
You are not alone... the flood only pours in through the open gates. I don't access any of the media channels through which information is sprayed at you as if from a hose, just the places I choose and the places I want. Once you learn how to do that and what to avoid the world is manageable. Recieving information is still a choice, and will always be, whether through technological measures (banner blocking, mute button) or by just shutting one's eyes.
This so-called disorder wasn't diagnosed, it was created. Somehow humanity went a few millennium without having to administer Ritalin like M&Ms. Now the first time a child demonstrates boredom or pique, parents and teachers want to start the prescriptions.
And the grown-ups "affected by ADD" are even worse. Sheesh.
Here's a cure for ADD, and in the spirit of the Net I offer it gratis: go out and do a month's worth of manual labor, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, regardless of weather or other environmental variables. You'll emerge with a laser-like focus for the most minute aspects of life. And no ADD.
Jack
That's not my experience. Even on an ADSL line, whenever a link brings up a popup, I typically end up hitting the close button on the popup before it's had time to display much of anything. Popups are annoying as flys, and likely to chase me away from sites that use them, but they're easier to swat.
Because cable service is only available from one provider in your location? I.e., no one is competing with them for your cable dollar?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If advertising could be _really_ targeted - so that the adverts you see are those for products or services you'd really be likely to buy - then aren't you directly benefiting by watching the ad and getting more information about what to buy?
If advertising were truly useful, you'd be happy to watch it for free because it would help you make the best choice of what to buy. Today if you want to buy a new car you'd certainly go out and research what's available. Even now, that might include choosing to watch advertising (promotional videocassettes or whatever).
You'd only demand payment to view an advert if you thought it would be useless. 'I'm not going to waste my time watching bland Coca-Cola adverts unless you pay me to do it.' And if you think that, you probably wouldn't be influenced by the advertising anyway. It wouldn't have any useful information - otherwise you'd have wanted to watch it voluntarily - and any marketing techniques based on making the product seem attractive or building up a brand image would be unlikely to work.
If you see Benetton adverts on billboards across town, you may get the impression that their clothes are worth buying, if only 'subconsciously'. But would it have the same effect if you just sat there looking at X seconds of advertising in exchange for a few pennies?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The flipside of all of this corporate sponsored information is that there is no way to tell what is information and what it PR. The great convergence is the one that combines: News, entertainment, sports, politics, opinion.
I read an interview last year with some engineers who pioneered audio timeslice compression technology that's used in commercial audio editing. The basic problem was that they needed to insert a sound byte of 60 seconds or so into a segment 40 seconds long w/o chipmunking it. So they figured out a way to slice out every third millisecond and playback the segments seamlessly. The 40 second boundary was the limit of what people were going to pay attention to.
Similarly a big problem for channels like MTV, BET is that few people watch a video for more than 2 minutes so whatever product they have has to fit close to that or at least not be materially harmed from a commercial perspective if the audience only listens to the first 2 minutes - eg. people will still buy it.
My point here is that I have trouble getting worked up about how people have trouble getting other people to buy junk they don't need. Maybe they'll clue in and start producing something useful instead.
...this is such an Earth-shattering discovery. Anyone who'd been paying attention (if you're still able to, that is :-) ) could have seen this coming.
Television programming has been including more and more commercial content for years. Then there's infomercials. (Do people outside the U.S. have these oddities on their TVs?) Should ADD be blamed on Madison Avenue? MTV? Something in McDonald's hamburgers? Who knows. But the increasingly shrill nature of TV commercials (IMHO) and the number of ads you're seeing on most web pages nowadays, especially the increase in the number of those that are animated, seem to me to indicate that these folks seeking my attention are getting quite desperate. But we're tuning them out anyway. Perhaps our minds are erecting a protective barrier against the onslaught of information. If that's the case, greater efforts in making these attention getters more appealing (if one could use that word to describe a commercial) or memorable are just a waste of time.
As for adding technology to classrooms, as in Katz's posting:
Looking past the outright stupidity of such a proposal, less, and not more (IMHO), technology in the classroom would be a far preferable solution to the attention problem. Some would say that the explosion of new technologies in peoples' lives may be the source of all the ADD that's being diagnosed. Who needs the teacher keeping one eye on a magic board to tell him who's bored? That's the last thing the students need is something providing a distraction from the teacher's primary job. I had a thermodynamics professor who had a quite a low-tech means of engaging student's attention: If he saw you weren't paying attention, or even busy taking notes when he thought you'd be better off listening more attentively, he'd merely fire off a piece of chalk in your general direction. Got your attention and you tried not to let any more chalk projectiles fly past your ear. No expensive electronic classroom gizmos were necessary. And the money that would have been wasted on such a silly piece of technology went to pay for better educators.
Wean children off the technology that's supposed to be making it easier for them to learn (but are actually just high-tech spoon feeding programs) and perhaps the occurances of ADD will decline. My family just moved and I haven't installed an antenna for the TV and we haven't wanted to pay for cable. I've actually seen a difference in my daughters behaviour in the few weeks that our house has been without the rapid-fire, designed-for-those-with-short-attention-span, programming. And, amazingly, we've all managed to remain sane, happy, and productive. Much to the consternation, I'm sure, of the advertising agencies. (And, No, I wouldn't consider us Luddites. I think the 100baseT network of seven computers would get us kicked out of that club.)
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Exactly. When we train children from practically birth to focus on pretty flashing lights and bleeping noises, anything that doesn't involve pretty flashing lights and bleeping noises becomes tough to pay attention to. In fact, anything else starts to seem ... BORING.
Sorry, Jon, but you are displaying your own ignorance here. Life was not, contrary to what Hollywood would have us believe, insufferable tedium until the harnessing of the electron. And I'm not convinced that "ignorance" has declined over the last century. Who is more ignorant, a 2001 teen who knows where all the weapons caches are in Quake III, but thinks food comes from grocery stores, or the rural teen of the last century (or the Amish today) who would be mystified by the computer, but read the newspaper and actually understood the myriad complex tasks involved in a farming household.
Right. We are bombarded with a constant barrage of information, most of which is useless and much of which is not even true. Meanwhile, we have lost silence and the time and ability to actually reflect on what matters.
But think for a minute: What could be more boring than this constant barrage? (The channel-surfer complaint: "500 channels and there's nothing on!!!???) And what could be a better definition of ignorance than not even knowing what merits attention?
The ONLY way to have a Guinness is on draught!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
When I saw the headline for this piece, I couldn't help but wonder if it was inspired by this recent Onion article.
Having been through it, there is a progression that people go through when it comes to these new media.
;-) This is just what happens, because the usage of one medium leads to the usage of others. During this stage, due to people's wide eyed dreams of how great things could be with all this technology, they adopt the usage of too many media and make habit of taking in more information than they can deal with but just don't notice it.
;-P).
;-)
~Wonder:
This is the opening stage. People look at the new media and are in amazed by them. People stand in awe at the potentials and think of how great thier lives could be if only they got involved. This is where most people start to go wrong: they dream up their own hype.
~Adoption:
You know how this goes. First you say 'Okay, I'll try doing e-mail' and then next thing you know you're an info glutton.
~Info Gluttony:
This is the stage Jon is focusing on. After adopting technology, people love it and want all the info they can get. Every little news story they can find, they read. Ever IM they get results in a big conversation. Every message board they post to turns into a huge debate. They take and give so much informaiton that they don't have time to do anything with it. This is where a lot of people are (especially all of you who post to Slashdot a lot
~Fallout:
Eventually people realize the fallacy of having more info than they can use and have a falling out with the new media. This doesn't mean giving them up, just a big reduction. No more hitting reload on the news sites every minute. Fewer IMs. Less Usenet usage. Few message board posts. Fewer mailing lists. For example, when I went through this stage, I reduced my regular Web site visits to Slashdot, Ars Technica, UF, Sluggy, and GameBoy Station. Also, I cut a lot of mailing lists that just weren't so useful to me and just went cold turkey pretty much on other stuff.
~Wise Usage:
Here in the final stage, after getting rid of all the glutt, you can make wise use of the info available. For example, I now have a few more sites that I read regularly and some that I just skim. I know what info I need, how much time I have to collect it, and how to skip that which just isn't useful. Alas, many people never make it to this final stage. Rather than becoming wise information users, they simply use the fallout as a correction that slows their info gluttony for a while, but they soon are back in full swing usage. They fall into a cycle of feasting and fasting: information spendthrifts, if you will. I know of no way to teach how to decide what information one needs wisely, other than to have a fallout, learn from it, and constantly keep evaluating how much inforormation is worth to you and what you really need.
BTW, here's $1 for reading all of that.
-- Gordon Worley
...paying attention to the road when they drive. Paying them to pay attention to anything may be the only way to get the idiot cattle to look at anything.
I don't know about y'all, but I see idiot cattle walking, chatting on their cell phones, oblivious to everything around them. I only wish more people would stand in traffic and get removed from the gene pool.
I live in Chicago, and I have to say that, for a large city, people are not directly rude or obnoxious, but they certainly are by omission. They choose not to pay attention to people standing around them, they stop their cars to double park on busy streets, they walk three abreast at a snail's pace on a busy sidewalk. They do any number if inane little things that make one want to shoot them.
What in the world would give one the idea that an advertiser might have to pay an individual to read an advertisement?
What I'm really talking about is people's excuse to be inconsiderate of their fellow humans. I personally cannot admit to being able to take every thing it, but I do make a consious effort to not do things that could potentially piss someone off (i.e. something that would piss me off) like walking side to side on a sidewalk or doubleparking my car in a spot that is going to cause a hell of a traffic mess, even if it is only for 30 seconds.
I don't happen to think that it is very difficult to pay relatively close attention to one's surroundings in a big city. Hell, I think you are an idiot if you don't (that is "you" as in a generalization, not "you"), because you're like as not to be hit by a car or falling piano or whatever.
As far as people's assessments, advice, and the like governing people's purchases is concerned: what the heck? I mean, really, people have been senselessly buying things based on the product's image for decades (at least).
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Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I know enough to put reliability ratings on everything I read. The traditional print and broadcast media are not usually blatantly biased, but they are biased almost all the time.
What I like is The Internet with it's open, uncensored, up-to-date and wide participation. It's a very rich information source if you're willing to work. Some would rather others filter it for them. Not me. Tradutore, tradittore . Filters always lose information and gain bias.
I know enough to put reliability ratings on everything I read. The traditional print and broadcast media are not usually blatantly biased, but they are biased almost all the time.
What I like is The Internet with it's open, uncensored, up-to-date and wide participation. It's a very rich information source if you're willing to work. Some would rather others filter it for them. Not me. Tradutore, traditore . Filters always lose information and gain bias.
Give em all "e-ritalin"
Want Root?
Having this kind of "business" consumers vs. sellers mentality in education could really contribute to a descrease in the quality of that education. I know that concept has been prominent here at Penn State University--that the students are consumers who pay for a service, that is, their education. Unfortunately, this has created lazier students who demand higher grades, because students realize that they are in control. Trying to compete with the Internet, television, and other forms of media to compel students can only make the situation worse.
It is no secret that the classroom experience, for the most part, bores students when compared to the high-paced, personalized media of today's mass media market. But I don't think the answer to captivating students is to integrate and use this technology as a replacement for traditional teaching methods. Once the education system tries to compete with mass media for young people's attention, it sets itself up to become a competitor, which could be a very dangerous game to play. Whereas media has in many ways taken a presentation-over-content approach in order to gain viewship, education cannot afford to compromise subject matter in an attempt to "defeat" television, Internet, etc. To do so is to compromise one of the very foundations of education.
I'm certainly not arguing that the new forms of media have nothing to offer in education; quite the contrary, they can be a powerful tool when used as a supplement. Technology allows the presentation to be altered, the content to be more easily accessible (class notes on a web page, online discussion forums). Nonetheless, it is important to keep the distinction between the two. I mean, imagine if class were like the Internet...students looking at a large monitor as the professor jumped from page to page, each with vital information. But what if in an attempt to keep the students interest, the professor only spent about five seconds on each page? Most of the information would be skipped, lost. As Brooks said in The Shawshank Redemption, "The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry." If that mentality overtakes the education system, it'll be even worse off than it already is.
You're not the only one. We turned ours off - after trying digital cable for a year only to realize that the overused complaint about "500+ channels of nothing" was horribly true.
It was amusing, however, turning in the digital cable boxes but keeping the cable modem and phone service (which also comes thru the cable line). The cable provider didn't know what to do!
The fellow at the counter who I returned the boxes to thought at first I must be a "disconnected for nonpayment" - since NO ONE returns their cable tv voluntarily. He looked up in puzzlement and said "But... your account is fine!"
Then he figured I must be moving, and wondered where the cable modem was. He couldn't understand that I was keeping that but not the TV. He had to ask a supervisor how to credit the return of the digital TV converters but not the cable modem - and in fact told me I'd have to buy it so they could resolve the account.
The final proof of their confusion was when they disconnected my TV... by chopping the wire in back of my house (immediately killing the live phone and cable modem). A lengthy discussion with the customer service supervisor indicated that they simply don't have a process contingency for people who want phone and Internet, but not TV.
Yes, you're not doing your part for society if you're not staring at TV advertisements every evening! ("Don't make me tape those eyeballs to the screen!")
*scoove*
I would have read this article, but I just didn't feel like paying attention...
"Business, magazines, websites, software developers, entertainment companies may soon be paying you to pay attention to their creations, rather than the other way around."
That has already been done. You can read all about it over at Fucked Company.
If radio stations hadn't been doing this for the past 60 years. What do you think all those prizes they give out are for? Why does my favorite station give out a case of Bud Light (wish it was Guiness) on friday as part of a Bud Light promotion? Really, everything involving technology and marketing hasn't changed for over a hundred years. The technology is the different, but the basic concepts of business remain the same across generations. This is the lesson the remaining dot coms are slowly learning.
clever! of course you do have to take into account the fact that Jon Katz isn't a very good writer, so there's a real reason to skim read it, apart from just a lack of attention. for a better analysis of the need for attention, be sure to read Aldus Huxley's Island.
if you're going to read about attention, it should at least be from somebody who knows how to write.
ATTENTION. ATTENTION. HERE AND NOW BOYS.
- j
My wife was in one of those herbal product multilevel marketing schemes a year or so ago. They addressed this point (people's attention is increasingly fragmented) over and over and said that was the main strength of MML - the personal touch got the first sale and the lock-in aspect of MML kept the sales coming. I never bought into it - I kept trying to explain to my wife who Ponzi was - and needless to say, we never got rich...
Make affiliate bucks
OK, so I've probably got great brand-recognition; show me a logo from any of the top 500 consumer retailers and I could probably identify it and tell you what the company sold. But, unlike my parents, I don't feel obliged to buy Pepsi or whatever just because a celebrity was paid a vast amount to appear in an advert and tell me it was cool. I prefer to make informed purchases. I can only think of 2 adverts in the past few years that, without any other help from reviews, have actually interested me enough to buy something, and they weren't for massive purchases. And I think this is because I (and a lot of other people about my age [22]) have learnt that advertisments can't be trusted because they're trying to make a buck, not be our friend.
And brand recognition can work negatively too - I make a point of not purchasing anything with a really annoying advert (if I can possibly avaoid it, naturally) and I suggest everyone else does the same.
Companies can do all they like to grab my attention, but ultimately it's still advertising and I'm so horribly de-sensitised to it that you could bombard me with annoying jingles all day round and I still won't buy.
Companies are going to need to start looking at brand quality again.
I think this scenario is only possible if people are indeed interested in an obscene variety of what are, quite frankly, mindless stupid things. This is not meant to be flame-bait. But much of the information competing for attention is not "knowledge" per se; it is some form of titillation or advertisement. This "information" exists in American society because its producers know that someone, somewhere, will be interested, and that's the source of the problem. An uneducated, uninterested populace provides the fuel for this fire; technology only provides the means.
When the authors mentioned by Katz claim that this situation is to some degree inevitable, I'm not sure if they mean inevitable as a result of particular social factors that exist in the US or inevitable in general. If they meant the former they are absolutely right. In a capitalist society where citizens' true appraisal of something's importance is how much money is spent on it, look at our education budgets.
Drawing some lessons from basic economics, treating information and attention like supply and demand shows that there are two ways to reduce the current level of saturation: decrease supply or decrease demand. Supply is here to stay. But if this were to become a society where people are more interested in science and public policy and other productive areas of information the demand for drivel would fall dramatically. There's a reason the situation is far worse in the US than in other advanced-industrialized nations. Real education is the answer.
On the other hand, I think Katz' conclusion about how we eventually must begin to withdraw from the information flood is totally wrong. People are more likely to succumb rather than to fight back -- the whole article is about how the flood is molding people into conformity with its goals. This must be fought by demanding better, not by retreat.
The business of getting attention is nothing new. There are PR firms that have been in business for almost a century. I'd say that this problem has been around ever since information became industrialized, and that happened late last century. Heck, it probably began to be a problem as soon as reliable telegraph service became available. Suddenly you could information from across the world in time to actually make decsions that could affect the event's outcome. So, one reason that news has become briefer is that an event is no longer reported after the fact, but as it happens. So, detailed after action reports became a series of just in bulletins. This has led to some problems. For instance, most of us have a good idea what's going on right now in the world, but have little idea of the forces that create the situations we read and hear about. And, it's very seldom that we ever see a followup that tells us how everything settled out. I think that the single biggest affect of communications technology is that we tend live in the now in the Western world with little notion of our history or where we're going. This has been the case at least since TV became widespread.
In terms of who to trust, we're actually better off than we were in say the thirties. Unfortunately in America we're slipping. Back in the day, news was a local monopoly controled by the dominant news paper. These days you can read the LATimes, the NY Times, listen to the BBC, and watch Nightline to compare the coverage. Of course, these days, there tends to be little difference between the major news organization is vanishing as national monopolies gobble up diversified local news organizations. Let's not even get into corporate self censorship! So who do we trust? In America, the answer increasingly no one. People are turning off from news simply because we've grown accustomed to the talking heads lying to us. So, we're heading back to the bad old days right quick.
Pop-up ads annoy the hell out of a lot of online users, but they're impossible to ignore,
.. My automatic reaction to a pop-up is to close it. To me thats a pretty effective way to ignore them, not to mention that I usually won't return to a site with pop-ups if I can help it..
What?
air and light and time and space
Please don't tell me you are so naive as to not know that it has always been this way.
I'm not someone who believes than any psychological condition removes responsibility for your actions, ADD included. But that also doesn't mean that the condition doesn't exist, and especially that research about it can't be helpful.
I would never accept "I have ADD/ADHD" as an excuse not to finish homework, etc. But acknowledging that some people's solutions are different than others isn't bad either. Self-titrated (doc decides the maximum, but you don't have to take it all the time) can be a wonderful aid in otherwise difficult situations. However, forcing kids to take it all the time as is common in this society is quite wrong, for a number of reasons.
(self-titration of some drugs is very bad, but Ritalin isn't one of them. Like prescription Tylenol, it can be taken "as needed" up to a maximum. Do not follow this strategy for antidepressants or antipsychotics, Prozac for instance) I am not a doctor, lawyer, or any other official oer.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Incorrect information has a tendency to travel faster and become more believed than truth does. People go to school for years to learn things about history, but if some media company made advertisements that stated the contrary *ahem*, most people will believe the advertisement. We are gullible and believe that people wouldn't tell us things unless they were true; as if there is some moral ground for advertising.
"This is where god would go if he wanted to get off blow!"
"I perceive that there is a trend occurring in America, because there is an element of our culture which I just became aware of, so it must be a new thing. By telling you about it, I am a journalist, but better than most journalists because I am into that whole Open Source thing that all the kids seem to be talking about these days.
Anyway, everything bad, frightening and/or dangerous about this trend, which I (nobody else) have boldly discovered, is the fault of Corporate Greed. We are in grave immeditate danger of becoming slaves to a Corporatist state. Boo!
Also, everything good, interesting, or revolutionary about this trend is the result of young people, who obviously have more energy, creativity, and all-around coolness than me, so I am trying to associate myself with this new trend of theirs so I can feel that I am superior to all those other aging Boomer journalists, who are just slaves to the Corporate State. By the way, if somebody from Wired is reading this, can I have my job back? Look at how many responses my Slashdot columns get! I can really bring in a lot of eyeballs for your ad revenue."
You are now free to skim all future Katz articles and read the vastly more interesting discussions which follow them.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
What was the author blathering about? I only read a few lines of the article then got bored. Can someone summarize it for me?
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Newsstand attendant: Are you going to buy that Playboy magazine!!"
Me: I'm only looking at the pictures....
Maybe you did, Katz. I thought everyone knew there was never any such thing as an objective newspaper or an unbiased historian.
Don't be a twit, Jon. Ever watch the movie "Amadeus"? Mozart was probably a classic candidate for Attention Deficit Disorder, and the movie depicted his symptoms to a T.
Just because ADD wasn't defined until the twentieth century (1902, mind you, not 1985 as you seem to think) doesn't mean the twentieth century caused ADD.
You mean someone may actualy want to pay me to watch an infomercial? Someone may pay to get me to answer a telemarketing sales call or read a spam email all the way? Wrong! Why do you think I pay for caller ID, use Proxicom, Junkbusters, and a TV guide. I choose what I want to do with my time Thank You. Actually if you want to buy my time, my rates are $65/hr. Contact my business manager for an appointment.
The truth shall set you free!
I can see the day when I'll be getting check in the mail to read other people's magazines and books and listen to music. That day is getting further and further away as I type this. Oops, it just disappeared out of view. Everybody and their brother are trying to charge users a subscription fee for info and services.
I tried to read this, but there were flashy thingies at the top of the screen, and little square things with stuff to click on the sides. And I just got more email. Was I reading something...? Ohyeah, I read some of it, but, umm...
what was I saying? Something about an X-10 webcam... wait... now I'm typing..
nevermi
Whatever happened to JonKatz?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I concur. As the step-parent of a kid who's suffering from ADD, I can tell you for certain that ADD is caused by a chemical imbalance, and not like Katz suggests by an overload of information. Katz, drag your head out of your ass and don't comment on medical issues that you apparently don't know anything about.
Hey, I didn't say I was watching the stuff. I'm only paying. The spouse is the one watching, and I value my life too much to snip that cable.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
The authors offer some inventive ideas about managing attention. Education, they predict, will adopt briefer, more varied learning experiences, instead of the traditional lectures that "numb the brain's of today's students." A classroom, they suggest, might be outfitted with a panel of lights at the teacher's workstation, one light corresponding to each student's seat. When brain wave monitors not that a student is paying attention, his light will be green. If the student's attention lags and the light goes red, the teacher can engage the student by asking a question, focusing his voice in the student's direction, or using high-tech graphics or other tools. (This gives one pause, given the post-Columbine hysteria. In U.S. schools, teachers would probably zap kids who were bored rather than challenge them.)
If nothing else, technology will make the linear thinking obsolete and open the door for alternative languages, interesting hypertexts, and more diverse histories accessible to students.
It's easy to label the students as the "ADD" or "MTV"generation, but they've always existed in each generation and this thinking is probably more a desire to get out of the box more than anything.
The purpose of the traditional, American classroom was to socialize young people to participate quietly in the established social order. American twenty-somethings in the 1940's and 50's did not have the internet; they bought Charlie Parker records instead.
Perhaps the dismay at technology's boom with young people is that each individual will live their own "underground" and only give the now-crumbling Westernized knowledge doled out in college lectures the brief nod it deserves.