Ambient Commons - Malcolm McCullough
Attention in the Age of Embodied Information
"Remembering can occur one detail at a time. A patch of sun slowly crossing a wall might produce a sense of calm while you work. It might remind you how not all that informs has been encoded and sent. Its higher resolution and lower visual demands can restore your attention in a world that is otherwise too often low resolution and insistent."
"Altogether, advertising stops at nothing. As a cultural force, it has few equals. And as environmental experience, it often leaves you little choice but to tune out the world."
"As explained in Lisa Reichelt’s Twitter-friendly coinage of “ambient intimacy,” social media use countless trivial messages to build a detailed portrait, even an imagined presence, of a friend. At least to some degree, this restores a lost kind of awareness found in traditional life. The upstairs shutters are opened, the bicycle is gone from its usual spot at the usual time, deliveries are being made, and the neighbors are gossiping. To their enthusiasts, social media re-create some of this environmental sense, albeit across the necessary distances and at the accelerated paces of the metropolis."
"(T)he role of technology shifts as well, away from a means to overcome the world toward a means to understand it."
"Until recently, interaction designers have focused more on how users apply technology in the foreground of attention, as a deliberative task, for an intended purpose—and less on the role of context, or the importance of tacit knowledge, and how these
"Like the German Umwelt (literally, “surrounding world”), milieu and ambiance also implied an environmental influence on outlook or action."
"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" (Herb Simon)
(Information Excess leads to Information Overconsumption and Obesity - this leads to a disregard of contextual quality. What does context matter anymore; "Fuck Context ! ..."(R.K.)).
"After a day of drowning in unpleasant data being dumped on them by others, some people relax with an evening of drowning in more pleasant data of their own choosing. But when it comes to restoring the powers of attention, might going for a walk do more good?"
"In this regard, paying attention simply means keeping a commitment to stay fascinated about something. It is the opposite of being blasé, that jaded state of overstimulation held to be the default state of modern urban subjectivity."
"As Gallagher summarized: “Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling similarly suggest that skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.”
Main idea: Embodied cognition
Counterargument: Representational theories of mind
Key terms: Pre-ontological, runaway ontology
What has changed: Cognitive science of engagement
Catalyst: Deskilling and distraction
Related field: Activity theory Open debate Tacit knowledge
"Civic identity has to count high among architecture’s roles."
(I think the civic scale feedback here is more interesting than the individual feedback patterns usually delivered, via personal devices. It is also a performance in the city.)
"The point is that many words refer to, or take scope from, where they are exchanged. A dramatist would understand this as “mise-en-scène”: a script needs a setting; objects (props and backdrops) provide orientation. A neuroscientist would understand this as “scaffolding”: the objects and settings that language refers to become building blocks of action and thought. Rich metaphor depends on analogy in spatial experience."
"An age of flux still needs host forms and channels, much as a river needs banks. Instead of “permanence,” which by now is a questionable word, it is better to describe this configuring quality as “fixity."
"After a long hiatus in the one-size-fits-all broadcast age, the relation of media and the city is coming back around to more helpful role as mise-en-scène"
"Form informs. The two words obviously relate. Yet this simple truth gets forgotten when information is always considered disembodied."
In regard to a newly added Exit Sign between to historic glass doors: "By building in such a connotation, in effect signs like this institutionalize distraction" ("an exit sign, in the age of compliance").
"A great deal of space gets socially engineered"
"Besides furnishing mise-en-scène for communications and scaffolding for sensemaking, fixity provides exercise and rest for attention. "
"And, in the long run, the play of shadows on the stone does a better job than any digital wallpaper could at balancing your attention. No pixel technology could deliver quite such high resolution, nor be expected to change its appearance quite slowly enough, nor to have such fixity."
In regard to patina: "Without some persistent structure, attention diminishes. Total novelty disarms. Better to have serendipity amid practice. Thus it makes sense that there is no better basis for cultural practice than the enduring city."
"In architecture and urbanism, you can’t just turn off the screen, or flip to another channel. You have to live in the artifacts."
"This begins with the tag. There is no simpler piece of situated technology..."
"The considered life requires a balance between messages and things, between mediated and unmediated experience."
"Does having more ambient information make you notice the world more, or less? Can mediation help you tune in to where you are? Or does it just lower the resolution of life?"
"The role of architecture seems central to future inquiries into attention. The cognitive role of architecture is to serve as banks for the rivers of data and communications, to create sites, objects, and physical resource interfaces for those electronic flows to be about. At the same time, architecture provides habitual and specialized contexts by which to make sense of activities. And, where possible, architecture furnishes rich, persistent, attention-restoring detail in which to take occasional refuge from the rivers of data."
"Silent fascination can restore attention."
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