Attention Literacies summary

"Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies " from Educase Review  by Howard Rheigngold, claims that we need to start utilizing the internet to its full potential. Rheingold challenges Carr by saying that social medias, such as Twitter and Facebook, actually improve our cognitive skills. He says we work on our attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness and critical consumption. Rheingold says that to master all of these skills, you must work on all of them, the come hand in hand. He then goes into detail about these 5 subjects. He says that attention is the "fundamental building block of how individuals" think, create tools, socialize, and transform civilizations. Contrary to Carr, Rheingold quotes Linda Stone who says that multitasking and continuous partial attention is just as good to work on as focused attention. We need to know both so that we know how to focus on multiple things at once or on just one thing when necessary. The internet and distractions that come with it help form the skill of multi-tasking. Rheingold then goes on to participation. He says that even if the thing you say isn't useful or good, it “gives one a different sense of being in the world”. He’s basically saying what Thompson quoted, “90% of everything is crap…” . Next is collaboration. Like Thompson said with the theory of multiples, Rheingold says “in general doing things together gives us more power than doing things alone”. Next network awareness. With the internet and social media, we are able to make more social interactions than ever which Rheingold connects with freedom. Finally critical consumption, which Ernest Hemingway called “crap detection”. This is the ability to find out what and who is trustworthy. We do this on the internet all the time and this helps with our real life skills.

Overall Rheingold is saying that the internet, more specifically social media, helps us with skills that carry over into real life.