Attention span - December 25, 2011

It's been really lovely today: up around 40, sunny all day. I took Anya out for a walk down the street this morning, and over to the dog park this afternoon. Not a white Christmas, but nice and quiet. Sadly, Ingrid was sick with a cold all day. But it was a lovely quiet day for all the mammals in the house.

Walking with her this morning, it occurred to me that what I said yeaterday about the difference in attention between heating with gas, electricity, or oil, and heating with coal, wood, or pellets, is the same as the difference between caring for a cat and caring for a dog. You still need to pay attention, and it surely doesn't hurt to pay more attention, but the immediate consequences of truly ignoring your dog for six or seven hours are a lot messier than doing the same for a cat.

We're house-sitting a friend's cat over the Christmas week, and we go over once a day to change the food and water and clean the litter. When we just had cats, we hired a sitter, and we asked they spend a little attention time, at least to the ones that liked attention. The one we're sitting now has made it clear we are not his people—he tolerates a little head scritch, but then he has other things to do, thank you very much.

Really, this distinction of frequency of attention applies to almost any management or care situation. More attention is required of by kindergarteners than fifth-graders, and if there's a fifth-grader who requires kindergarten-style attention, that can be a problem.

I think one can say of any of the systems we've put in place to deal with conditions outdoors, and to keep those outdoors out, that they are designed to lengthen the time between attention. They are designed, in effect, to let us do other things than deal with rain and snow and wind, heat and cold.

Is this what technology is in general, a way to let us stop paying so much attention to this, so we have more time to pay attention to that? What then of people who intentionally ignore a technology, because they want to pay more attention to this?