The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
Focusing your concentration on some phenomenon to the exclusion of others, either subjectively or objectively, is a form of taking control of your own mind. I find it useful to pay attention to what tends to capture my focus, since what I focus on is who I am in a way. Anything one focuses on becomes a bottleneck and while bottlenecks arenât intrinsically bad they always come at a cost.
A very great cost because as it turns out capturing attention is a very profitable endeavour, the attention economy earns more than $100 billion in revenue annually.
The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials â in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating.
Links
- Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quarterly/article/ethics-of-the-attention-economy-the-problem-of-social-media-addiction/1CC67609A12E9A912BB8A291FDFFE799
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/01634437221077168
- Personalised Filter Bias with Google and DuckDuckGo: An Exploratory Study: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-26438-2_39.pdf
- Measuring Personalization of Web Search: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.05011
- Design of A Virtual Environment That Employs Attention-Driven Interaction and Prioritization: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-7091-7519-4_11
- From Gaze Perception to Social Cognition: The Shared-Attention System: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8114330/
- Salience-based object prioritization during active viewing of naturalistic scenes in young and older adults: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78203-7
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory#Description
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/