Nick Sweeney has a gift for writing just the right words on the internet. Crisp. Elegant. Thoughtful. Often the perfect capture of something that's been floating around for a while. He grabs the seeds from the air and firmly plants them.
His motion and rest is just such a thing:
"What, then, does the internet of rest look like? (More than just Netflix, surely.) How does it speak to us, and how do we address it? (More than just a listening box, surely.) What does it demand of us — or more importantly, what does it refrain from demanding? That’s the challenge for those who wish to bring the Internet of Things to the home: to draw upon the power of mobile devices without being beholden to their restive hardware."
I think this what I've been stumbling towards with Secondary Attention and my experiments with sound. I'm trying to imagine a background internet.
Right now everything's in a stream that looks like news. It all looks similarly important, so we have to engage with it as though it might be important - specifically, looking at it.
Whereas, if it was just on in the background, in a way we could put at the back of our minds, that would be fine, restful even. And the stuff that captured our interest would, well, capture our interest.
