Glass House Conversation, April 7-8, 2008
Attention Span
What does it mean to be attentive in the age of distraction?
What we pay attention to defines what we think and what we do. Participants identified attention as a key element for personal orientation, along with gender, and belief-systems. How and what we give our attention to creates the foundation for our lives as it fuels our curiosity.
A lively dialogue followed the question, “Who is paying attention to attention?” As one answer is marketing, participants discussed how the quality of attention is linked to the quality of experience. It was posed that “how” we pay attention should be considered as well as “what” we pay attention to.
Controversy followed the suggestion that, as new technologies offer vehicles for communication and information, we have an opportunity for an evolved level of emotional connectedness and exchange on a global scale. All agreed that attention is worth attending to as it the topic was able to be explored in multiple contexts, including education, media, technology, psychology, neurology, history, travel and humor.
Conversation Participants
Paul Holdengraber
New York Public Library
Stuart Brown
National Institute for Play
Dorothy Dunn
The Glass House
Ze Frank
ZeFrank.com
Paul Holdengraber
New York Public Library
Andrew Hultkrans
Author and Editor
Pico Iyer
Author
Nathaniel Kahn
Filmmaker
Maira Kalman
Illustrator, Artist, Designer
Christy MacLear
The Glass House, Executive Director
Nils Norén
Vice President, French Culinary Institute
Jorge Otero-Pailos
Columbia University professor
Adam Phillips
Psychoanalyst
Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Author/Scholar
Selected Excerpts
On nature versus technology:
And so I think the nature versus technology thing – one reason why some of us are keener to look at this scene than look to our screen is that this scene feels to be human paced and sometimes the screen seems to be post-human paced. In other words, technology is about acceleration – moving very, very fast. This is about moving the pace of an eye or at the pace of a hand. And I think attention isn't quite a laser beam so much as we only have a certain amount of it and we do have to make choices.
Attention as selection:
The cultivation of attention:
Attention is something that his cultivated. That it's not, you know, a natural reality… we structure it as a society, as a series of groups and so on, and that goes back to this historical dimension that you're bringing about. That, for me, is very interesting. We tend to cultivate certain patterns of attention making and we tend to repress others. And so we are now having a discussion about which patterns are worth cultivating, but we're not talking about which patterns are, let's say, being repressed.
About the Conversations
Glass House Conversations continue the important legacy of Philip Johnson and David Whitney through a series of invitational dialogues bringing together thought leaders from across society for conversations that explore important issues and new ideas.
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