To get the ball rolling………………………………..
The article we read drew evidence from 2007 relating to ‘youngsters’ use of the media. It says that ‘web surfing’ only took up 1.02 hours on average, and that music took up 1.44 hours. I would listen to much much more music than that, my day is all-consumed by music to the point where their is literally a soundtrack to my life of alternative, electronic, indie, rock and so much more…. But this is all whilst also web surfing… Via my smartphone or tablet (which did not exist back in ’07). Hence….get your shit together Mr Professor.
In response to the concept of the lectorial itself… Well I hope the next one is more tutorial than lecture. Standing in front of the group and talking to us is usually just called….well a lecture… but don’t worry Brian I have faith in you- and your chicken coup (?).
I believe the reading was supposed to explain the concept that we need both deep and hyper attention to indeed function at our maximum capacity, that a balance between the evolved and the primary needs to be achieved in order for Media to truly be as effective as possible, in both learning it and teaching it. Which is kind of a no-brainer to me? To learn we need to participate, in order to participate we need to pay attention; and seeing as we are media students, we are rather easily bored by non-active tasks.
I mean think about editing a film… it takes hours and hours of work, hours of attention, hours upon hours of clicking and hot-keying until something is achieved; yet… most of us love doing it (I sure do). It’s that nit-pickyness, that precision, that complete control of product that I love. I can sit for hours editing the one scene, I can sit and watch clips over and over until it hurts to watch it again. Now that is a perfect example of both deep and hyper attention. We switch between programs, between windows, make jumps in time, focus on different aspects all at once (sound, lighting, visual); but we also focus our attention purely on singular instances… Like cutting and trimming that one shot until it’s absolutely minutely perfect up to the thousandth of a millisecond.
But I already knew that? We all already knew that? We just didn’t call it hyper attention or deep attention, we just called it… being who we are. Because truly it’s formulated into our identities, that is, the ability to do something for hours on end purely for the sake of enjoyment.
So screw the reading. We don’t need the pompous bullshit where a professor feels the need to establish his biases in 20 pages of text that can all be confined down to one paragraph. I don’t need to annotate, I need to participate.
Hyper attention FTW
