An office building nearby renovated their ground floor with a new food court. Great idea but they also added a semi-circle of TVs all tuned on CBC News that pretty much looks over most of the seating and the food stalls. It’s hard to avoid. Easy enough to modify the environment on our phones and desktops but it’s more inconvenient to avoid IRL distractions.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
51–60 of 141 posts
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#52An office building nearby renovated their ground floor with a new food court. Great idea but they also added a semi-circle of TVs all tuned on CBC News that pretty much looks over most of the seating and the food stalls. It’s hard to avoid. Easy enough to modify the environment on our phones and desktops but it’s more inconvenient to avoid IRL distractions.
Gyms that have wall mounted TVs always on is a peeve of mine, especially when it's nonsense political commentators. I actively have to avoid glancing at the TV screens.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#53"When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#54An office building nearby renovated their ground floor with a new food court. Great idea but they also added a semi-circle of TVs all tuned on CBC News that pretty much looks over most of the seating and the food stalls. It’s hard to avoid. Easy enough to modify the environment on our phones and desktops but it’s more inconvenient to avoid IRL distractions.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would appreciate if you could share that Youtube download script.
https://gist.github.com/dikeert/ce43bfe607e46c9c04e47ab5a0e6...
Nothing sucks like saving a video, forgetting about it, seeing a [Video removed] in your favorites and Youtube not even telling you what it was. That's just bad UX imo..
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is what paperbacks, newspapers, radio, tv, movies, etc were/are called at one time or another. I bet in 20 years, smartphone and social media companies and everyone else will be ranting about VR being a distraction.
I think this dismissal really ignores a very crucial difference. Unlike magazines or even TV for that matter, the new social media has personalized and detailed information on individuals and can tailor their content and design to target every person individually. IMO, that is a substantial and qualitative difference that makes the new “distraction” mediums far more effective and dangerous.
Digital feeds never end. There's always something new, always something interesting. There's always something. You can keep staring at the screen endlessly. And if one app doesn't give new stuff anymore, there's 10 other apps within a tap away to give you more.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#57I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…
> we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored Yup.. personally I somehow feel it's "wrong" that I sit there and do nothing on the rare occasion I get the opportunity.
I strongly recall going with my parents to the laundromat as a child and sitting there for 3 hrs straight on a chair. I had no phone, no book, no other kids in the building, and the arcade machines and other things all costed quarters that I didn't have. I would just sit there bored out of my skull, and I hated it more than anything else in the world. It wasn't like playing outside with friends where we could invent our own games, it was cold sterile nothing in a smelly building. When people complain about contemporary kids on their tablets or phones 24/7 and how this is bad I always think back to these times when I literally didn't even have a crayon to scribble with. The times I remember fondly of exploring/playing/running around the neighborhood/drawing/ fighting/ etc are more memorable, but in terms of objective measurement, were vastly outweighed by sitting doing literally nothing. I feel like people often view the world with rose-coloured glasses when they write these anti-screen messages.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#58I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…
I feel like this misses the point because you're still looking at it through the lens of productivity, albeit a step removed from "writing code" kind of productivity.
In your example you're still doing something -- "trying specifically to drum up ideas for something to hack on".
It seems like, if anything, this is an example of what the author is talking about: the need to turn everything into productivity.
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#59I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…
Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
#60I get a hangover from the weekend... because I do nothing. I go for walks, read a book, ask my kids whether they think there are more cats than animals... I work on old recreational maths puzzles. I wander over to my friend's house for tea to catch up on how he's doing. We check for caterpillars in his garden on the way out. I plant wildflowers in my own.
The hardest part of doing nothing is learning to live with all the people who can't.