#Firstworldproblems

I really enjoyed this week's reading, the Hayles article, "Hyper and Deep Attention", was particularly interesting to me. In the article, Hayles describes a two extremes of attention: Hyper attention and deep attention. Deep attention is most evident in acts like close reading, performing surgery, and similar activities. In deep attention, individuals devote their focus completely to one thing while blocking out everything else around them. Hyper attention is the exact opposite: it is the epitome of multitasking. Hyper attention is characterized by paying attention to multiple things at once, it s a search for increased stimulation of the brain, and jumps from one thing to another. Hayles suggests that with the increasing prevalence of media in today's culture, society is moving more towards hyper attention. Hayles also claims that hyper attention came first evolutionary, since our ancestors who had to live in the wilderness needed to be able to focus on multiple things at once to avert danger.

This last point is what interested me the most. It would suggest that the development of deep attention is a response to a less strenuous form of living. In the wake of a lack of danger, and increased comfort, individuals have the liberty to focus more on a single thing without worrying about multiple external factors. Yet, the recurrence of hyper attention is a result of media- things like video games where children must focus on multiple things at once. Video games, however, often aim to mimic the conditions that our hunter-gatherer forefathers lived in- an increasingly dangerous environment. Games like Call of Duty place players in an environment where death is imminent, where external factors are so strong that hyper attention is the only way to survive. As children use ToM methods to imagine themselves as the characters of these first person shooters, the invariably imagine themselves in the same dangerous environment that our predecessors were in. Thus, in a way, our society has tried to return us to the dangerous, increasingly complex environment that we got out of in our comfortable world. We essentially got too bored with our world, and tried to find a way to mimic a more dangerous, and interesting one. #firstworldproblems