[ Thanks to M.
Fioretti for this link. ]
“Attention is precious and scarce like gold in this age
of continuous interruptions, tweets limited to 140 characters and
people for which something simply doesn’t exist if it doesn’t pop
out in the first page of Google Search results. In september 2010 I
have participated to a conference devoted to this theme, that is
Paying Attention: Digital Media Cultures and Generational
Responsibility. It has been an interesting experience and one that
has confirmed to me, as I’ll explain in a moment, the need for
“hackers” and all the other people, including (especially?) people
in academia, to pay as soon as possible much more attention to each
other.” I am not a real software hacker (a term whose real meaning is
not “computer criminal”, thank you very much!). Sure, I only use
Free Software like Gnu/Linux or OpenOffice, I write and teach as
much as I can about it and I can proudly apply patches to source
code and compile it all by myself if I really have to. However,
almost always I stop at that much simpler, wonderful way to
automate computer usage called scripting. Still, I was probably one
of the closest things to a real hacker you could have found in that
particular conference.”