@philosophyminis: Harry is on his phone, and he's scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and up pops a video of a cat eating a watermelon. He laughs. He double taps to like, and then he goes back to scrolling. Now up pops a video about a local politician who's been caught out lying. But he doesn't like politics. It's boring, and so he goes back to scrolling. Is Harry wrong because he's chosen to direct his attention away from something morally important? According to Sebastian Watzl, he is. And it's something that Ground News can help us with. Watzl argues that attention is not just the same as taste, but rather a moral act, because when you give your attention to one thing, you take it away from another. And the problem is, as Watzl puts it, that attention plays a large role in describing our behaviours and our beliefs. In other words, what you pay attention to will change how you think, and what you do. And this is why I like to use Ground News. Of course, Ground News doesn't force my attention, but it does allow me to see what is in my blind spot. It shuffles the stories and presents me with things I tend to ignore. It shows me things I don't, and things I should see. It reclaims the news from being an attention casino, and returns it to being a kind of moral steer. If you want to reclaim your attention and take the news seriously, there is a code in my bio to get a discount on the version of Ground News that I use, because how you devote your attention is not a morally neutral act. How and where you devote your attention matters.

Jonny Thomson

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Region: GB

Friday 29 August 2025 19:15:00 GMT