Prologue to the book, Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information, by Malcolm McCullough

I just read this prologue to a book that may be relevant to my dissertation, and possibly of interest to some of the Synthesis Center researchers. (Keep in mind that I've only read to the end of the prologue at this point, so I'm not extending any critical perspective on the book as a whole at this point.)

McCullough describes of a moment of attention, in which screens and displays become something more (and less) than simple "portals into other spaces".

-Byron


McCullough, Malcolm. (2013). Ambient Commons : Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. MIT Press. Retrieved 18 June 2014, from <http://www.myilibrary.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu?ID=475570>

Prologue:

“Out on the street, a cool night rain blurs the lights of the city, and water slowly drips off the signs. You step into a doorway to look at your phone. Kept dry there, up under the canvas awning, a speaker showers you with tinny tunes. Yet you no more notice these than the video display in the window, or the messages on your phone for that matter, for a splash from the sidewalk has soaked your shoes, and in this moment of disorientation, something just feels very good. Maybe the water streaming over every surface helped, but, for a second, the world seemed of a piece, not just made of so many competing links, but somehow more immediate, with order and measure, a patchwork that for a moment you felt as one coherent space. In this sidewalk epiphany, the usual chaos of so many shallow short messages momentarily gave way to a presence that felt whole, of much higher resolution, in a word: replete. 1 What felt good was seeing more where you looked, instead of quickly wanting to look away. The rain brought out colors in the stone. The world became inexhaustibly detailed and present, in ways that a flickering picture is not. And, for a moment, maybe because you saw them streaked by the rain, even the glowing rectangles of your phone and the video display felt like features of this one, immediate, urban space, rather than simply portals onto other spaces, with furnished perspectives, all at no particular distance. For a moment, it seemed as if the sphere of information was embodied persistently in a physical commons. The sights and sounds of the city, the noisy, numbing vitality that leaves city dwellers experiencing daily life in a state of distraction, well, it all felt different for a second. Here was kind of attention that you could perhaps re-create, maintain, and manage, as if it would affect whatever else you notice. For one replete moment, you could understand the workings of attention, and how it might be worth knowing them better in an age of overload. When you perceive the whole environment more and its individual signals less, when at least some of the information superabundance assumes embodied, inhabitable form, when your attention isn’t being stolen, when you feel renewed sensibility to your surroundings you might try calling this ambient.”