AmbientAttentionYogaDayThree
From UoWiki
Watch the people. It does get easier. Eye-contact is unavoidable. The gaze has to stop somewhere.
What if this experiment is harder for men? Is a female gaze less threatening?
Things just jump out at you, make you feel alive - not sure if it's more exhausting or inspiring. Feel giddy and sated with humanity. Two blind people. The iGit with his white headphones and Hoxton Fin who leaped to help him to a seat. The guy who stopped at the dead escalator and changed to the moving one. The spotty swell-dressed stewnt with his just-so-jacketed Heat-reader glirfriend. The guy with the sports bag who smiled for a fraction of a second when I caught his eye.
Dougie wrote that he likes the bursts of 'popular culture' represented by the verts on rare occasions when he ventures Tube-wards. But what's this swell and rush of human movement if not popular London culture?
Had a debate this evening with a former marketing executive turned drug-abuse worker about AAY. He sees verts as an objective barometer of where the culture is and so doesn't object to their presence. 'They're pretty ruthless', he tells me, 'Adverts don't last long if they don't represent what people actually want.'
I think my problem with them might be more that they've nothing to do with what we need. Do we need to educate our desire any further?
It's becoming more natural to avoid them. Think of how the eye skips over homeless people, or the pile of unsorted papers in my bedroom.
Is it possible to re-cultivate selective blindness, develop a habit of disgust with respect to adverts? How long would it take?
Also realised there's a scientist at my workplace who does research into visual fields and perception ...perhaps I should go ask him what he thinks .
Later in the day, Jo added some comments that made me wonder how this all connects to recent UO discussion of wiki spam .
