Spent the early part of the day reading on the internet:
Are you overconnected? – BBC Future
The Mindfulness Racket – Evgeny Morozov
Mindfulness as a support for capitalism: happy workers work harder, etc. Social media as gambling machine.
Camp Grounded: Digital Detox and the Age of Techno-Anxiety
(yet another ‘in the age of …’ article. Nice photos of iPhones wrapped in kale leaves.)
Digital Distractions – BBC Future
All of these ignore the sorts of incremental disconnective practices that Ben Light was talking about.
Also downloaded A lexicon of attention: From cognitive science to phenomenology by P. Sven Arvidson , which looks like an abridged version of the Spheres of Attention book (£108 at its cheapest). I spent most of the afternoon reading this very dense article that seeks to provide a translation of disciplinary terms between cognitive science and phenomenological approaches to the study of attention. Neither of these are my field, but I did make some sense of the spheres of attention that Arvidson outlines. Based on earlier work by Gurwitsch, the structure of the field of attention has three distinct areas: theme (the thing that is the main focus of attention); thematic context (the stuff that the theme is materially connected with and the centre of orientation of); margin (irrelevant to the theme, but still part of the field in that it might become the theme at any point). The article also talks about how each of these are organised along different principles (respectively: Gestalt-coherence, unity by relevance, and co-presence, terms that I don’t really understand the significance of yet). I was also interested in how the transition between one and another of these spheres can take place, through a dynamic tension and transformative relationship.
I spent the rest of the evening beginning to populate the website at long last. Once it’s done, I’ll be ready to start presenting myself to potential advisors.