Attention

A set of connected connections.

“What, the internet requires less attention? Yes, because it demands so little of us intellectually and appeals so powerfully to our feelings.”

“Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights.”

“Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new state of the biosphere, and described it as the planetary “sphere of reason”. The noosphere represents the highest stage of biospheric development, that of humankind’s rational activities.“

“In his private life, McLuhan wrote to friends saying: “I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies.” Further, McLuhan noted to a Catholic collaborator: “The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction … is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word ‘evolution’.… That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community.“

“I’ve seen various attempts to rationalize Trump’s sudden embrace of what looks like old-fashioned imperialism.“

“The question for this series is what does it mean to be an individual in contemporary US society. “