Week Six The Commons: Collection and (re)Distribution/Assembling Attention

According to this week’s reading, it can be seen that this week’s blog word is focused on the ‘commons’. Actually, even it is a very broad concept for me, it also simply can describe as a piece of publishing information that is available for every individual to access. It can be defined as that belonging to or participated in by a community as a whole, public and all of society and its public can have access to this ‘common’ piece of information. The other way to say it is the published material is thus open for all the public and has no boundaries.

It is obviously to see that the modern world which we all live in today is dependent on resources encompassing biodiversity, education, the technology sciences and the digital world. When it comes to media publishing, the word commons must be related to the availability and access of published information. For example, not all television channels can be easily accessed like the pay TV companies called Fox tel which needs to pay money if you want to access those channels. This restricts who can view certain television shows, movies and sports games. Whereat on Free-to-air television the channels are open and ‘common’ for all the individuals with TV.  Therefore, in my opinion, the truth is that the information is not completely free but an issue. Society as a whole would perform much better if every individual have equal access to the most basic published news and updates as to what is occurring within their society. An informed public creates an educated public and finally leads to an all round more active and liberally involved society because of the shared information of the common.

In the lecture, Andrew has mentioned the idea of ‘economies of attention’ that all attention is distraction which is just attending to something else. Attention is a private experience yet in today’s world it has become a common. In modern media society, having the attention of someone is very powerful as there are numerous distractions and interruptions. Advertising revolves around grabbing our attention like we are always being distracted and made to focus on something else. An example can be founded is that when the TV channel we are watching changes to an advertisement, we are being told to draw our attention to the product being advertised and momentarily forget the show. This is what Andrew said about the attention in the lecture.