Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (MIT Press)

Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented.

Sensors, processors, and memory are not found only in chic smart phones but also built into everyday objects. Amid this flood, The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever.

Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information by Malcolm McCullough

You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underneath all these augmentations and data flows, fixed forms persist, and that to notice them can improve other sensibilities. In Ambient Commons, Malcolm McCullough explores the workings of attention though a rediscovery of surroundings. Not all that informs has been written and sent; not all attention involves deliberate thought. The intrinsic structure of space -- the layout of a studio, for example, or a plaza -- becomes part of any mental engagement with it.

McCullough describes what he calls the Ambient: He explores how the fixed forms of architecture and the city play a cognitive role in the flow of ambient information.

Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information

As a persistently inhabited world, can the Ambient be understood as a shared cultural resource, to be socially curated, voluntarily limited, and self-governed as if a commons? Ambient Commons invites you to look past current obsessions with smart phones to rethink attention itself, to care for more situated, often inescapable forms of information. Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Ambient Commons , please sign up.

Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. A pretty nice overview of the ambient factors of our hyper-technological world. Though I am partial to the argument that the latter is irrelevant, it would still be nice to see it mentioned. I liked the chapter on architecture, but that was mostly due to me thinking about what it lacked: It seems like one would have to do some work to mention the 19th century restructuring of Paris but leave out any mention of Haussmann.

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There is also a pretty weak understanding of Debord and the Situationists with, of course, no mention of any of the other major players. I also liked a chapter near the end that reframed the overabundance of media as "pollution. The chapter after this, though not really offering any conclusive evidence, speaks of biological limits on filtering and an idea of "peak distraction" with which we, as humans, cannot comfortably deal. The book ends with a discussion, and consideration, of silence and an invocation of natural noise rather than the intentionally created type that surrounds us.

Aug 10, David Barrie rated it really liked it. But what's so good about this book is its timeliness. Creative culture just now, fueled by corporate commercial interests and their political yes-men, is slave to 'smart cities' and 'ubiquitous data' boosterism. McCullogh raises some important questions about shared resources and informational ethics. Who owns our data?

Technology and Culture

Who owns our attention? Just as we have a right to be heard and remain silent, do we have a right to be left alone? Dec 24, Ev rated it liked it. This book started off slightly awkwardly, like a hermit navigating a cocktail party with tequila shots, but steadily evolved into sober coherence.

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In the first pages, McCullough behaved as though he only had 1 minute left on earth and you were the only available receptacle of knowledge. Mercilessly, he cornered you as soon as you made eye contact walking through the door, and, in between gulps of jungle juice, unleashed his data dump: I'm sure it's a relief to you to be retreating This book started off slightly awkwardly, like a hermit navigating a cocktail party with tequila shots, but steadily evolved into sober coherence. I'm sure it's a relief to you to be retreating from an annoying set of glowing rectangles at work to a soothing set of glowing rectangles at home.

Electronic media complicate this overlay. Ubiquitous technologies exacerbate this anytime-anyplace problem. Music and television feeds show up where they are not welcome. Mobile phones lead to inconsiderate use. Self-service touchscreen with network connections mediate ever more kinds of transactions. This is neither an empirical case study, nor a systematic, comprehensive historical synthesis—it is an intellectual journey where McCullough walks a vast and sublime conceptual terrain though it is not a hike to recommend for beginners. This emphasis on breadth of inquiry over depth of inquiry is both the strength and the weakness of McCullough's book.

It is indeed refreshing to accompany him as he juxtaposes moments and meanings from across the arts, culture, and humanities scholarship of a dozen disciplines. Information infrastructures are a "modern firmament" in the tradition of medieval cosmology; "intrinsic information" built into environments is exemplified by the transcendental impact of growth rings evident in a tree stump; and [End Page ] the "continuous partial attention" we provide to electronic screens of all sizes is interpreted with reference to the writings of William James.

But McCullough's whirlwind tour through the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of mind, attention, and interaction rarely pauses for long enough to build up an argument for the many provocative claims and judgments that he offers along the way. Some of these seem downright nostalgic, as when he argues that "cumulative, cultivated engagement with embodied, direct stimuli provides a defense against predations of mediated novelties and interruptions" p. Unfortunately, such sweeping statements sometimes undermine his original and very useful goal of problematizing the very terms he's using.

What does "embodied" stimuli mean within different technological and historical settings? How do we define what is "novelty" or "interruption" in different social circumstances and from different positions of power? And how can one easily contrast "direct" stimuli with "mediated" information, when the starting point of the whole project was to try to break down a notion of what "mediation" even means?



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Such concerns, however, reveal the real power of McCullough's essay: In keeping with this argument, he ends his book with an epilogue declaring that "You should have the right for your environment to remain silent" p. McCullough admits in his introduction that his use of the term ambient "is a simple name for a complex set of phenomena," which he hopes "usefully conflates several noteworthy conditions found where a new attitude about attention meets a new era of information technology becoming situated in the world" p. He ultimately asks, "do increasingly situated information technologies illuminate the world, or do they just eclipse it?