Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes
We are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses challende to education at all levels. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the shift. The shift in cognitive styles can be shown by a contrast between deep attention and hyper attention.
Deep attention: concentrating on a single object for long periods, ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times.
Hyper attention: switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high levek of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.
Studying Me-dia: the Problem of Method in a Post-Broadcast Age
The success of these methods depends on an uncomplicated relationship between the researcher and their object.
Problem 1: Volume – Output is not created by the media factories but through individuals, networks and groups manageing their relationships and sharing their lives, thoughts, and experiences.
Problem 2: Dispersal – Broadcasting was dominated by mainstream. Todays digital production is atomistic and decentralized. It is happening wherever there are people and wherever there is a connection. This is the age of thin media: the media spread over every digital outlet.
Problem 3: Ephemerality – There is physical fragility (ailing hardrive) and loss (dropped memory stick, lost phone)
Problem 4: Access – Broadcast products were designed to be open and accessible to the majority of the population. In contrast individuals texts, comments, messages are inaccessible without permission. Media studies then depends upon the ability to recognise and see and analyse media production and consumption.
Problem 5: Discovery – There is a limited number of channels of information, and our limited interests ensure we miss what all others are interested in.
Problem 6: Content – Several areas of media are private. How do you study the ordinariness, incomprehensibility, banality or offensiveness of personal media production.
Problem 7: Ethics – Media research without some illegal copying or downloading would likely result in a skewed representation of many people’s behaviour.
Problem 8: Production – Who precisely is the username on sharing sites or forums? How do you study anonymous people?
Problem 9: Audience – Media studies has often treated the audience as the truth of the media – but how do we find and understand these people?
Problem 10: Generalisability – Results obtained and confirmed by observation were spatially and temporarily generalizable
Problem 11: Accumulation – No amount of individual researchers can sample, or study, or discover or access, or find enough about media worlds. Post broadcast production is harder to classify and categorise and hence is harder to sample
The Discipline of Nothing – John Mason
“Each level of noticing requires energy, that is, each requires intention and commitment…Noticing is a collection of practices which support the transformation of energy into deeper, stronger, and more robust noticing”
Intentional Noticing
Since what we fail to notice is unlikely to have much influence upon our actions, it follows that in order to alter our actions it makes sense to work at broadening and deepening our sensitivities.
Noticing is a collection of practices both for living in and hence learning from experience, and for informing future practice.
Essence of noticing
Our attention is highly selective. We could not cope with ll the impressions pressing on us at ever moment. We need to be selective in order to survive.
Noticing, marking, recording
To notice is to make a distinction, to create foreground and background, to distinguish some ‘thing’ from its surroundings. To notice can be taken to mean the same as to perceive, even to sense in the most general ‘sense’ of that word.
Did you notice?
Ordinary-noticing, or perceiving, provides the rich backdrop of experience on which learning depends, but in itself is insufficient. It is distinguished from noticing which refers to all aspects of moving from ordinary-noticing or perceiving, to marking and recording, and to various practices which support these.
The backbones of noticing are ordinary-noticing, marking and recording.
