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The Noticing Project#

Noticing Work#

We live in what scholars and technologists call an “attention economy”—an environment in which our focus has become a valuable resource that countless apps, advertisements, and platforms compete to capture. When attention is treated as a currency, the rhythm of daily life tends toward speed: we glance rather than gaze, skim rather than read, and move on before we have fully arrived. Trained to habitually shift from one stimulus to the next, we lose the capacity for the kind of sustained and patient attention that allows us to truly observe and reflect. However, as James Williams writes, there are greater costs:

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

This assignment invites you to step temporarily outside the accelerated rhythm of modern life and practice slow looking—returning again and again to a single, seemingly unremarkable place and documenting what reveals itself to you there through the work of patient and persistent observation. The goal is not to reject technology or modern life, but to cultivate a complementary skill: the ability to direct your attention deliberately, to sit with what you see without rushing toward a conclusion, and to discover what emerges when you give a small corner of the world your sustained, unhurried, and contemplative gaze.

Pick some thing or some place that requires little effort to visit: a park bench; a particular tree; a single study carrel in the library; a window in a building; the inside of a public refrigerator; a single artwork at the museum; the front yard of a frat. Return to this place frequently—multiple times per week. This should not be a location you experience routinely, such as your living space; instead, you should visit some separate location, away from your everyday life. Think of this as field work.

Record your observations and date your notes with timestamps. Some of these notes may be very brief; some observations may cause you to write at more length. You might additionally choose to record what you see with photographs, audio recordings, or drawings. Your observations may lead to broader questions or curiosities that require research to resolve—follow the trail of thought where it leads.

What do you see? What do you see if you look and look and look again? What has changed since your last visit? What did you fail to notice before? What curiosity do you develop? How could you research or further investigate these things?

Inspirations#

| Words

“Listen. Listen. Listen. We can never be too attentive to our world.”

— Madison Smartt Bell, “Zero DB”

“Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new.”

― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. . . . [W]hat a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”

— Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

“Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.”

— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.”

— William James, The Principles of Psychology

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

― George Eliot, Middlemarch

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