So two days ago i just read John Mason’s “the discipline of noticing”. Of course, I didn’t try to do any of the excercise he mentioned but he taught me one thing, that to notice, we require effort. Because we are given thousands of stimulation every day, our mind would have to be selective and blurs out all the ones not necessary for us. Maybe that is what marketing student try to overcome #randomthought.
To notice is not just to experience, but also to reflect upon it. We see advertisements, we feel the heat, we hear the taxi’s engine, but we do not notice. What the text meant by noticing is by realizing that I am typing, I am looking at my screen, I have acomputer with, I am studying abroad, my carpet pattern’s is circular, and so on. When I travel to a new town, I always have this perception of unfamiliarity, that a place is new, and thus everything that I saw wasy interesting to me. But the roads that I had travelled in my hometown for the past 17 years seemed colourless and not vibrant. But when I try to change my perception, as if everything that I saw was new, I began to notice how much things had changed. Another simpler example is your growth. You seem to never notice that you were getting taller and older, until you’ve seen a photograph of yourself when you were still an infant.
To notice is to make a distinction, to create foreground and background, to distinguish some ‘thing’ from its sorroundings.
John also describes about recording. To him, recording is the desire to keep a memento of the things you notice, in the form of a note, journal, or for me, photographs.
By making a brief-but-vivid note of some incident, you both externalise it from your immediate flow of thoughts, and you give yourself access to it at later date, for further anaysis and preparation for the future.
I think this is one of the reasons why we are subjected to read this article. To make great media content we have to notice all the media sorrounding us, to be inside the group. We would use that to show people the things left behind, un-noticed. Because sometimes we try to create the most interesting and complex form of media, when we forget the simplest ones. What I learn from this article is to notice the simplest things, and figure out the best technique to represent what I notice in the most interesting form.