Web Monitor
15:30 UK time, Wednesday, 9 December 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: Attention seeking explained, over-rated information overload, and the rise and rise of fake snow.
• Actor Colin Firth has been doing the rounds promoting his new film A Single Man. that attention-seeking can be an addiction:
"We actors do want attention. It's hard to fault an actor who's having his insatiable need for attention fulfilled because he'll probably be at his best. It's that Tom Waits line, 'I don't have a drink problem Sir, until I can't get a drink.' So check in with me when I'm not getting any attention and I might be a different person."
• Information overload has been blamed for impeding our decision-making skills and ruining our attention spans. But it's over-rated. His proof is that otherwise we would be doing something about it. Instead he describes a Catch-22 situation:
"We open junk mail, we watch junk television, we read junk e-mail. It would take investment of attention to save our attention, and most people just aren't willing to invest."
• The Dubai ski resort, back in the news recently, is the image of exuberance for . Smith finds that, thanks to new technology, fake snow has a new lease of life in ski resorts across the world, which can start their season early. Smith tries to figure out what the fake stuff tells us about controlling our environment:
"Of course the boast that you can burn through a truckload of water every minute does not reflect a discerning nature. If ice is civilization, then maybe artificial snow is post-civilization, we long ago having accepted as fact such pleasant things as anesthetics and food preservation, but not yet having fully mastered the art of getting what we want, when we want it and, now, where we want it. So on we continue making snow - on the slopes and off."
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