The revolution will not be the only thing going on

Can I truly be interested in everything all of the time?

There are two kinds of things I want to know about right now:

• things that are important, world-shaping, and deserve my immediate attention, and
• things of very little value that aren’t going to have any value at all unless I know about them when they happen.

Twitter serves up both equally well and at exactly the same rate. Is that a problem?

We’re all guilty of boring our families with diatribes against the 6 o’clock news when they jump from coverage of violent revolution in some temperate clime to the discovery of a family of squirrels that resemble various ex-presidents. But left to our own 3G devices are we any better? What would “better” look like? More sombre? Serious? Erudite? The opposite of frivolous?

I’ve been watching the Twitter stream on Iran’s crooked election today and found myself by turns horrified and inspired. But I’ve also kept up with friends. I’ve had a nap. For dinner I had leftover curry with a cold beer. I’ve listened to Queen.

I don’t have any profound moral conclusion to draw at this point (and I hope for the sake of the readership of this blog I never do). But I wonder whether, as the power to filter information shifts downstream, our increasing responsibility for the use of our own attention comes with a moral imperative to attend to certain things that wouldn’t be otherwise accessible, or is this just a transition towards people acting more like themselves?

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