Attention
Attention Please
Last Plane To Jakarta, the music review blog run by The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, had a very interesting post this week. Within it he mused upon the subject of attention, saying:
I’ve been listening to, not ready yet – never! never ready for that! – to just link to the artists or songs in question without saying something, anything, about why I think they’re worth your attention. Because: your attention is more valuable than the present age would have you believe. It’s the one thing you brought to this world that it didn’t have before, and it’s the only thing of consequence that you’ll permanently remove from this world when you leave. You know? So when somebody sort of cavalierly directs your attention someplace without so much as a tossed-off phrase indicating why you should bother, then you ought, in my opinion, to regard such people/sources/tweets as emissaries of the dark Lord. To say that something “has to earn your attention” is false; one of the miracles of attention is that it sometimes yields the biggest dividends when it’s given weightlessly, unmerited, on a one-way street. But that’s not to say that attention is so light a thing that one can afford to shed it like dandruff. Our supply of attention is finite. That’s worth remembering.
He was recommending Tiny VIpers , but let’s just take some time and ponder how valuable your attention is, and what you do with it.