教会我们如何专注的人：John Berger 与注意力危机
The Man Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention
A.O. Scott 在 Longreads 撰文，借 John Berger 的《Ways of Seeing》《About Looking》等著作，呼吁在注意力危机时代重新学会观察。文章指出，Berger 早在 1978 年就预言图像主导会让人丧失记忆与判断力，而这一诊断在社交媒体与人工智能接管记忆、判断和解读功能的今天显得更为真实。
John Berger spent a meaningful portion of his life thinking, with precision and care, about how to look at the world—an effort he detailed in numerous essays and books, among them Ways of Seeing and About Looking. “Reading them, you often feel you’re standing next to him in the museum or even looking through his eyes at a painting or a sculpture,” writes A.O. Scott. “You pay attention to his attention.” Scott, an attentive reader himself, brings Berger’s lifelong project into our famously distractable era; his consideration of Berger is a primer for observation and study, a gentle nudge to focus, lest we lose sight of something essential.
Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction. Berger saw this crisis coming and foresaw its consequences. In 1978, writing about photography and its impact on the modern world, he argued that the dominance of images “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.” That diagnosis seems even truer today, as the functions of remembering, judging and interpreting are increasingly offloaded from human minds and communities into the ether of social media feeds and artificial intelligence. We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.
来源：Longreads · longreads.com
原文链接：https://longreads.com/2026/10/20/john-berger-about-looking-ways-of-seeing/