This is my 80th and last book for 2021. Some good points from this book :
1. It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, one captured by the phrase “homo distractus," a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.
2. The invention of "Prime time", the attentional habit of turning on the radio (later, the television) at the designated hour each and every evening of the year was a momentous cultural as well as commercial innovation. It transformed not only the industries equipped to capture attention, but also the lives of those whose attention was now there for the taking.
3. The celebrity culture is so frequently linked with older traditions of worship, since ancient times we have been identified with heroes, demigods, and saints. This is “essential craving" of all humanity to be connected with the “extraordinary". It touches us within, lifts us momentarily beyond ourselves, so that we seem to inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel in touch with the deeper currents of life.
4. Television’s representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an "illusion of intimacy" to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV.
5. Social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.
6. In the 2010s it had become more obvious than ever that technologies like the smartphone are not merely extensions but technological prosthetics, enhancements of our own capacities,which, by virtue of being constantly attached to us or present on our bodies, become a part of us. Whether called a "phone" or a "watch," the fact remains that "wearables" take the check-in habit begun with email and turn it into something akin to a bodily function, even as they measure the bodily function.
7. We are living in the age of fourth screen which is smartphone. First is cinema, second is television and the third screen is personal computer. I wonder what kind of screen is coming next.
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