Zaturdays: Stop Scrolling Article at Skatepark of Tampa

Zaturdays: Stop Scrolling

Posted on Friday, June 2, 2017 by Paul

“1971 Nobel Prize winning social scientist Herbert Simon observed, ‘In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious, it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’ Simon’s insight is often reduced to ‘In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.’”
Maybe these can help you stay on top of it all?

The above quote is taken from the book The Inevitable, by author Kevin Kelly, which sums up what he says are the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. I’m a sucker for anything that promises to help us understand what’s coming down the pipe, and while I like to think of myself an optimist, with the steady and unstoppable rise of Artificial Intelligence it’s hard to envision a future where enough of us humans have anything left to do but sit around consuming media.
In my vision of the future those would be storm clouds.

The point of this weeks rant is our poverty of attention and what we can do about it. In skateboarding’s case the information comes in the form of Instagram clips, YouTube videos, Podcasts, Skate Apps, webcasts, even a print mag thrown in here and there. We’re at the point now where there aren’t enough hours in a day to keep up with all of it, maybe even keep up on the best of it (and here you are whiling away your precious moments on another Zaturdays, thanks for sticking it out). And I can tell you from experience, if a 20 second Instagram clip gets off to a “slow” start due to overly dramatic editing or just not getting straight to the action, I keep scrolling. And it’s only going to get worse. So what’s the takeaway? Well, if you’re an aspiring pro skateboarder who needs our attention to get where you want to go, or a brand that’s trying to get us to notice your product and pay for it, just recognize that our attention is scarce so come up with something worthwhile that grabs us and forces us to keep looking. But if you’re like most of the rest of us, aka media consumers, the only sound advice I can offer in dealing with it is this: stop scrolling and do something that truly deserves your attention, like skating.
Problem solved!

Comments

Subscribe to the SPoT What's Up Blog

Enter your email: