At this point, it feels like we have overwhelmingly more mediums to get to knowledge than actual valuable knowledge, at least in written form.
Was it the only way that this attention economy cannibalized the age of information?
Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#2Yes, just as reasons made an orgy of the age of reason.
Novelty and mass apatite are only eclipsed by the panicked reflex for survival.
Curation is the new art. Find outlets which themselves refine and distill, without disappointing.
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#3“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” -- Carl Sagan
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#4Yeah because creating new valuable information takes attention, and we are having attention sapped from most due to the addictive smartphones and technologies that are always with us and super performant.
I got the iphone 13 pro, and the 120hz screen lets me read more stuff more quickly. Have I benefitted towards my "life goal"? Probably not, it may have been a detriment.
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#5The algorithm values content more over information. Good information is expensive. When's the last time you paid money for content on the internet?
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#6We never got to the information age, we got an age of paper emulation. True information weaves together many sources with a rich context. We never got the Memex, and it's been almost 80 years now.
On top of that, we got pop up ads, spam, and pages that are actively hostile to users intent.
The insult is far worse than you imagine.
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#7It's all about advertising revenues.
Advertising was invented for classified ad buyers by newspapers. It has since adapted to each new medium that came along, radio, TV, signboards, etc and now all manner of internet properties.
With technical searches, carefully crafted search terms can locate useful information. However, I find that once I venture into more general realms, the majority of the results, no matter how detailed the search terms, are ads or content with masses of affiliate links, etc. That is, very low grade ore (information), effectively useless for knowledge building purposes.
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#8The algorithm values content more over information. Good information is expensive. When's the last time you paid money for content on the internet?
There are lots of pay-walled sites, that serve up information of dubious quality and provenance. Which in turn makes it a crap shoot when it comes to sites that appear to have useful information and ask for payment.
If it wasn't for advertising revenues, sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and many others wouldn't exist. Most people would probably not choose to pay to access those sites.
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#9We never got to the information age, we got an age of paper emulation. True information weaves together many sources with a rich context. We never got the Memex, and it's been almost 80 years now. On top of that, we got pop up ads, spam, and pages that are actively hostile to users intent. The insult is far worse than you imagine.
Even with some kind of memex, I think eventually information start to be repeated purposelessly.
I think eventually we need some kind of canonicalization in order to progress, in terms of knowledge/information organization, but I'm not sure if that's a doable in today's digital society.
Re: Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
#10Yes, just as reasons made an orgy of the age of reason. Novelty and mass apatite are only eclipsed by the panicked reflex for survival. Curation is the new art. Find outlets which themselves refine and distill, without disappointing.
I see, one of the challenges I find there is that outlets overlap intentionally and partially and there's no incentive to only refer information to its canonical source.
Maybe it's just FOMO on information .