A new app by writer Robin Sloan attempts to -- in a way -- break through our now limited attention spans, by requiring your focused attention to get its message.
“I'm a huge fan of the web -- I basically live in my browser, with 26 tabs open at any given time -- but I've become more and more conscious of the price we're paying in terms of attention and focus.” Sloan told Mashable. “So I wanted to write about that, and also make something that 'fought back' against those pressures and sort of insisted on a certain kind of attention.”
Called Fish, Sloan's app is an interactive essay that require you to tap the screen to read through it. Sloan worked out some of the basic ideas for the essay in a text editor, but then created the app and the essay side-by-side. Each page of the app essay contains just a sentence or a few words, and tapping on the screen advances you along.
“Everything we experience on the web, we experience inside a tab, inside a browser, on a laptop screen, surrounded by a dozen other things. So what happens? You flit from Facebook to Twitter, you click a lot of links, they all line up next to each other, you give up on a few and get absorbed in some others…ad infinitum,” says Sloan. “Slowly you close the tabs you're done with and the ones you know you'll never get to, and you never go back. All in all, I don't think that's a very fulfilling way to read or watch anything, especially considering the caliber of stuff that's out there available to us today.”
The entire essay takes about 15 minutes to read in total, the equivalent of a short commute or lunch break, and like its construction deals with how we look at things and declare "like" or "love" on the web.