For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.
Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be conscious of, and therefore plays a part in the coming into being of whatever exists for us.
Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
Nowadays we have so many things that take our attention - phones, Internet - and perhaps we need to disconnect from those and focus on the immediate world around us and the people that are actually present.
Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
Attention is the fundamental instrument we use for learning, thinking, communicating, deciding, yet neither parents nor schools spend any time helping young people learn how to manage information streams and control the ways they deploy their attention.
We're living in a high-tech world. So much of our stimulus and entertainment comes from things that are quite abstract and disembodied.
I'm terribly attention-seeking. It's very different once you get all this attention, though. Because then you want to control it. And you can't exactly.
Whatever we put our attention on will grow stronger in our life.
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