the.com/attention
the rarest currency on Earth, spent everywhere and saved nowhere
means the mental act of focusing your awareness on something while filtering out the rest.
from From Latin 'attentio,' from 'attendere' — to stretch toward — built from 'ad' (toward) and 'tendere' (to stretch). So the original image is bodily: you literally lean and stretch your mind in the direction of a thing, like reaching for it. 'Tendere' is a busy root, a cousin of 'tension,' 'tend,' and 'tent' (a stretched skin). The word arrived in English through Old French in the late Middle Ages.
- brief window
- focus drifts roughly every few seconds naturally
- limited bandwidth
- the brain consciously tracks very little at once
- the economy
- trillion-dollar industries built to capture and resell yours
- selective hearing
- you catch your name across a noisy room
- costly toll
- every notification taxes minutes of recovery time
the dress — 2015 viral photo that split the internet over whether it was white/gold or blue/black, garnering 4.4 million tweets in 24 hours
slenderman — 2009 creepypasta that generated massive internet obsession and led to the 2014 wisconsin stabbing by two 12-year-old girls
tide pod challenge — 2017-2018 viral trend where teenagers filmed themselves eating laundry detergent pods, causing 39 poison control calls in january 2018 alone