I was trying to figure out where I had picked this one up recently and finally did. It is part of Viridian Note 00002: Viridian List Mechanics by Bruce Sterling.
… It is easy to cut-and-paste
huge archives of found text and images, and to bomb
one’s hapless correspondents with them. The time and
attention of recipients suffers badly, since the work of
distribution can be accomplished in seconds, while parsing
all that text, and finally deciding that it is useless,
can take seemingly forever.…
Our first formal innovation is an attempt to steal as
little of your attention as we can. …This effort, however, may not be enough. You may
still find yourself painfully tempted to actually *read*
the Note. We therefore offer a backup safety system, our
unique “Attention Conservation Notice.” This will begin
each Note by explaining to you, in some brief detail, why
you should NOT read it.…
Since the list editor has already taken the trouble to
figure out what’s wrong with it, you might as well know,
too.
The standard notices he lists are great though. No forum should be without!
With time, we hope to develop a standard set of
“Attention Conservation” disclaimers that will save you
much mental processing time. In future, the following
warnings may see considerable use in this list:“Highly speculative;” “Beautifully phrased but offers no
evidence to support its claims;” “Of interest mostly to
technical specialists,” “Written in postmodernese;”
“Infested with subcultural jargon,” “Grimly accurate
assessment, can cause feelings of despair,” “Contains violent
partisan attacks,” “Writer’s original language not
English,” and so forth. (At least, those disclaimers
would be of huge benefit in most of the lists that we’re
reading right now.)
Great stuff. This goes into the Glossary and will lead into an article on attention economy at some point.
Reference
http://fractional.blogspot.com/2004/12/attention-conservation-notice-this.html
