An Experiment for Dealing With Media Overload

What’s the best way to sort, wade through and make sense of the oceans of digital media that’s stored on our hard drives? Inspired by musician Bill Drummond’s experiment of only listening to music starting with B for a year, Russell Davies is testing out the same filtering strategy on a compressed scale. In order to deeply engage with new music, and learn to pay attention in a new way, Davies is only listening to music starting with the same letter of the alphabet, one letter a week.

He explains:

I find that unless I trick myself into paying attention to music that I either just revert to tried and trusted favourites or let all sorts of new stuff drift by me an in ambient haze. Not really listening.

So I thought I’d try a 26 week experiment; listening to a new letter every week. Just to see what I notice. This is week A.

Projects for paying attention to attention. Those seem interesting now.

Russell Davies: talk about the As