Does the internet give us access to all the information while making it near impossible to think? Well, yeah, so it seems -- people have been doing research. It has to do with dwell time as much as anything. Being smart, it turns out, isn’t so much about brain power as the ability to focus what we’ve got in one place long enough to gain traction. Surfing is screwing it up. The reason print media is losing relevance is because fewer and fewer people can get to the bottom of the page. Is that bad? – probably. When slogans are seen as philosophy and sensationalism is called the news human potential starts way behind, and politics turn atavistic.
Art doesn’t cure it, but it can offer some relief. Art fortifies the attention span by expanding the moment. Instead of a flickering universal search, one teapot sits next to a cup and a lemon ever since you bought it, inherited it, were given it as a gift. On the first day a painting is seldom a match for the most modest of home entertainment centers, but it gains slowly, catching and holding our notice over days, months, and years. Owning interesting art is an investment in attention span management in coming decades, and it’s becoming a better bargain every day.
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