I actively listen to a vinyl record when I cue it up. I let the radio sputter in the background while I work.
I actively read a book when I have a night or weekend to myself. I let Hacker News articles tend to go in one ear and out the other, even if I tell myself I spent some time reading before bed.
I actively figure out what's going on in the world when "what's going on in the world" becomes too dire for me to ignore. I fall asleep to the 10:00 news.
It surprises me _not in the least_ that I'd spend time with something that I want to make time for, and not just something I've allowed to become part of my routine.
0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...
gyomu•4mo ago
That's a part of the equation for sure.
The other one that I keep coming back to is how the object captures your attention, and what it does/doesn't do to steer it, and what affordances it offers for it to flit to something else.
On a digital general purpose device, you are always one swipe, one notification banner away, from jumping into whatever other activity you want. Closing a book, putting it away, grabbing the TV remote, turning on the TV inherently has much more friction than swiping right on the home bar out of a reader app and straight into Tiktok.
This is why single purpose devices like eReaders are compelling - while they do not address this first half of the equation the author mentions, they do address the second half.
(but of course a beautiful object of a book will always command attention more effectively than the exact same book, but in PDF form on a tablet)
To try and and attempt an analogy, it's like trying to cook a healthy meal when you have a fridge only stocked with veggies/fish, vs one that maybe has some veggies at the back but also tons of snacks and instant food at the front.
We like to think we are masters of our attention and willpower, but as many already know it's really the environment does a large chunk of the deciding for us. If you want to make more intentional decisions, your first order of business should be to shape your environment (a hack monks have known for millenia).
MarkusQ•4mo ago
You really can't do that with digital media, letting your proprioception carry its share of the load.
lo_zamoyski•4mo ago
The file paradigm w.r.t. source code could be included here as well, as the concept of file is incidental to the logical structure of programs. The logical structure could also be expressed spatially.
sfn42•4mo ago
I think we'd need to come up with something better than that. There is graphical programming like scratch and unreal blueprints etc, maybe that has some potential for taking advantage of spatial reasoning, but I still don't really see it being particularly revolutionary.