Practicing Infotention

Today it’s a truism to say that we are all drowning in information, that it is pouring out at us like water from a never-ending fire hose. Such a situation has its advantages: it’s never been easier to locate information on any imaginable topic. But it also has distinct disadvantages: how do you identify useful and credible sources among the millions available to you, and how do you use them well once you’ve found them? We addressed the first of these questions in Chapter 18, “Finding Evidence.” But finding good sources is only the first step. Experts on technology and information like professors Richard Lanham and Howard Rheingold point to the next challenge: managing attention. Lanham points out that our age of information calls on us to resist the allure of every single thing vying for our attention and to discriminate among what deserves notice and what doesn’t. Building on this insight, Rheingold has coined the term “infotention,” which he says “is a word I came up with to describe a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters” (Howard Rheingold, “Infotention,” http://www.rheingold.com).

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Practicing infotention calls for synthesizing and thinking critically about the enormous amount of information available to us from the “collective intelligence” of the Web. And while some of us can learn to be mindful while multitasking (a fighter pilot is an example Rheingold gives of those who must learn to do so), most of us are not good at it and need to train ourselves, literally, to pay attention to attention (and intention as well), to be aware of what we are doing and thinking, to take a deep breath and notice where we are directing our focus. In short, writers today need to learn to focus their attention, especially online, and learn to avoid distractions. So just how do you put all these skills together to practice infotention?