Infotention

This weeks lecture focused on the combined concept of information and attention- ‘infotention’.  The term is used to describe the “psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters” (Howard 2009). Simply put this means we have the ability to seek tiny parts of information in a huge online space.

This is also known as a world of flow; we live in a world where information is everywhere (Guilhard 2010). Sociologist Danah Boyd, “suggests that you’re living in the stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it.” This means that we are no longer just passive consumers of media, taking in the information fed to us via print and broadcast media. Today, we can actively engage with the media content. We can comment on a news-story or YouTube video if we think it is offensive or attention worthy, we can even tweet and ‘tag’ opinions we have while watching a TV show. Zeebox is the main program for that.

We can see this in the social media site Twitter, or Tumblr, where you can re-post things and tag things you are interested in or think other people should be interested in. My 12 year old cousin has a Tumblr page about Pastel colours. Every time a #pastelcolour is tagged in a picture it gets posted to her ‘wall’. She has (technically) created a way in which she can effectively find information about pastel colours from all around the world. Her attention is therefore more focused on pastel colours.

There is a ‘pseudo-evolution’ of the mind whereby attention spans are dropping whilst our ability to absorb quick snippets of information increases (Cooke 2005) The newly created iPhone app ‘Summly’ created by Nick D’Aloisio is a development of this idea as it summarises the content of a webpage in to a few words. The implication of absorbing small amounts of information quickly has further been developed in televisions, which can display news headlines via voice recognition. It could be said these implications of media convergence are making our life increasingly fast pace (Cooke 2005). 

Nick D'Alsiosio, creator of 'Summly'

The ideology of the Internet as a public space is crucial when discussing the issue of The Commons. It would be hypocritical of any internet space to be privatized, the idea of ‘commons’ should be embraced in a free, democratic society.