I don't think it's a big secret that I'm a huge fan of Bruce Sterling, in particular his 1998 political thriller Distraction. Every day I see more and more things occurring in our world that very closely parallel the post collapse Louisiana setting of the book.
I've recently launched a BlogSpot dedicated to Attention Conservation. This is another Sterling-ism introduced in his second Viridian Note. The kernel of thinking behind this is that humans are simply not evolved for a 24x7 electronic media world. Our brainspace is as in need of conservation as any other natural place in the world today.
I have a handful of ideas already that I plan on developing, but I'm curious as to what distracts you ...
Here's where attention conservation started – Bruce Sterling's 1999 second note to the Viridian Design Movement, strikingly similar to the 1969 IETF RFC 3, the beginnings of the Internet Engineering Task Force and the reason you and I can communicate in this fashion today.
The second para-economic aspect is "attention economics." This one is more problematic, because this is where the cruelest forms of exploitation take place in the Internet's noncommercial world. It is easy to cut-and-paste huge archives of found text and images, and to bomb one's hapless correspondents with them. The time and attention of recipients suffers badly, since the work of distribution can be accomplished in seconds, while parsing all that text, and finally deciding that it is useless, can take seemingly forever.
So, what gets in your way of paying attention? It's not a large secret that I'm a mildly autistic adult – I have Asperger's Syndrome. I am quite used to thinking of the world as being too intense; visual stimulation involving motion, scents and sounds beneath the threshold for neurotypical adults, and a mish mash of other stuff related to cognition get in the way of my fitting in with the rest of you.
The distractions I think we share are …
An excess of communication, both corporate broadcast media and person to person driven.
An unnatural, industrial experience of time.
Media calculated to capture and retain human attention for the purpose of marketing
A diet full of things that capture the attention of our taste buds to the detriment of paying attention and living a healthy life in general.
A media that, even if one does not consume it directly, sets unrealistic expectations.
A lack of any sort of current tradition of contemplation in our largest religious sects.
So those are the things that come to mind with just a short consideration of the problem. If you made it this far into this less than 500 word piece, tell me what captures your attention that you'd prefer to be able to ignore.