Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it.
The Cost of Paying Attention
Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it. And yet we’ve auctioned off more and more of our public space to private commercial interests, with their constant demands on us to look at the products on display or simply absorb some bit of corporate messaging. … they’ve opened up a new frontier of capitalism … to monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence … And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe, silence makes it possible to think.
…. The benefits of silence are off the books. They are not measured in the gross domestic product, yet the availability of silence surely contributes to creativity and innovation.
… If clean air and water were no longer the rule, the economic toll would be enormous. This is easy to grasp, and that is why we have regulations to protect these common resources. We recognize their importance and their fragility. We also recognize that absent robust regulations, air and water will be used by some in ways that make them unusable for others. (Ya think?)
A notable feature of many formerly Communist countries is the apparent absence, or impotence, of any notion of a common good. Self-serving party apparatchiks have been replaced by (or become) quasi-free market gangsters. Many citizens of these countries live in the environmental degradation that results when economic development is left to such interests, with no countervailing force of public-spiritedness. We in the liberal societies of the West find ourselves headed toward a similar condition with regard to the resource of attention, because we do not yet understand it to be a resource.
MORE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/the-cost-of-paying-attention.html?smid=pl-share
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We can't turn away now, his piece was published!
