Projects for paying attention

Jan 27, 2009 by Dirk Singer

We’ve talked in the past about Dutch marketer Martijn van Osch’s experiment in cutting down his media consumption to the bare minimum. In the same vein blogger Russell Davies’ ‘project for paying attention’ (via PSFK) involves listening to music from only one letter of the alphabet every week (starting with ‘A’):

“I find that unless I trick myself into paying attention to music that I either just revert to tried and trusted favourites or let all sorts of new stuff drift by me an in ambient haze. Not really listening.”

Russell was inspired by KLF founder Bill Drummond’s attempts to listen to only music with the letter ‘B’ for a year and to set up ‘No Music Day.’

In the summer Nicholas Carr famously wrote his article asking whether Google is making us stupid. A trend for 2009 – different ways of filtering out media noise?

Image – Jeff the Trojan

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