It occured to me that a broken mirror is a good metaphor of what the modern web does to our attention. Instead of a whole smooth surface clearly reflecting the

It occured to me that a broken mirror is a good metaphor of what the modern web does to our attention. Instead of a whole smooth surface clearly reflecting the reality, our attention becomes shattered into many pieces, each reflecting something different. Books, due to a long continuous context, let us polish this mirror. For a similar reason, I guess, a typical exercise in the eastern tradition is to keep all your attention on one thing for a few minutes at least, and all the time, ideally. HN is, unfortunately, not very different: a stream of tiny disconnected comments shatter our attention if we read it too much.