Anne Truitt Zelenka

I printed out some articles and downloaded a podcast. I’m scattered from skimming too many feeds, so tonight and tomorrow I’m going to focus with full attention on one thing at a time. Here’s what I’ve got lined up so far:

• Clay Shirky’s article Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. This is from last year. One weakness of blogging is the focus on the latest post, on what’s happening right now. I don’t want to miss out on important ideas just because someone said them six months ago instead of today. Even that sounds ridiculous. People have been saying smart things for millennia. [Via Stefano Mazzocchi On the Quality of Metadata…, which was mentioned by Danny Ayers.]
• Alex Barnett’s podcast about attention. As he says, “attention is happening.” I’ll pay attention… for the full 46 minutes.
• Rashmi Sinha’s weblog, a happy new discovery for me. She’s a cognitive psychologist and technology consultant thinking about users’ cognitive interactions with the web, as shown in their use of things like tagging systems and recommendation engines. I’m going to read her two recent essays on tagging with great attentiveness.

Tomorrow I also plan to spend some time with the greatest thinker on attention of all time, the Buddha. Here’s a Buddhist teaching on mindfulness:

In ordinary life, if mindfulness, or attention, is directed to any object, it is rarely sustained long enough for the purpose of careful and factual observation. Generally it is followed immediately by emotional reaction, discriminative thought, reflection, or purposeful action. In a life and thought governed by the Buddha’s teaching too, mindfulness (sati) is mostly linked with clear comprehension (sampajañña) of the right purpose or suitability of an action, and other considerations. Thus again it is not viewed in itself. But to tap the actual and potential power of mindfulness it is necessary to understand and deliberately cultivate it in its basic, unalloyed form, which we shall call bare attention.

Web technologists and Buddhist thinkers both consider the issue of attention, but technologists go outside in (the computer records the user’s attention, then uses that information to make that or other users more productive) and Buddhists move inside out (cultivating bare attention brings about enlightenment or sometimes, is pursued without any goal at all). I don’t see yet whether or where these two approaches meet. They seem complementary. I need to meditate on it–another task for my attentive day.