| They based the exercise on one where choice was not eliminated: > Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her students. She asks them to go to a museum, pick one work of art, and look at only that for three full hours. Since what they have described as the "shape of attention" is more measuring how willing I am to endure a headache for no good reason, I would say it's a poorly designed experiment. The goal for the journalists here is to show something about the "fried attention span" of the twitter generation I'm sure, whereas the goal for the original educator was to get people to deeply engage with art that already spoke to them somewhat. Attention can and should be directed, but in general not by others, so this just doesn't measure what it claims to. And for what it's worth, I say this as someone who is more interested in art than the average person. I've not only looked at a piece of art for 10+ minutes before, but the last time was less than a week ago. Edit to add: What really is the difference between something you don't like & didn't choose vs say an advertisement? Does leaving the room during ads imply anything good or bad about the attention span of the public? |