1 rejected as hypocritical. The whole is less than the sum of the parts. There is a series of phenomena which has created a new dimension to what was never a very easy challenge – getting people’s attention: information overload, distraction, attention deficit, and so on. As journalist John Lorinc put it in a piece in The Walrus: Digital communications have shown a striking capacity to subdue our attention into smaller and smaller increments; increasingly it seems as though the sheer glut of data itself has supplanted the hand of focused, 2 reflective attention that make them useful in the first place. There are two great truths all of us need to remember: 1. We are designed to be selective. 2. We are designed to make patterns. It seems to me at least that the job of agencies assumes a simplicity we often forget amidst the cacophony of our overloaded, multi-tooled lives: we are the meaning creators. Lorinc quotes a puzzled participant in a technology conference asking: “If information is like the sea, what is seamanship?...We don’t talk about ‘human-wind 3 interactions’ – we talk about sailing.” The tension between humans and information is not another either/or, a dichotomy which we observe but do not seek to influence: we need both sea and sailors, but it’s the sailors who are vested with the task of deciding where to go and how. This digital seamanship requires two things which are not generally deemed to be so important by quite a broad coalition of those which have led the Short March – from the new media, to the technology platforms, to the millions of applications. It requires the ability to cohere, to bring together, to re-assemble the fragments, to make sense of them. And it requires some long-termism. The fragmentation has seen a descent into tactics as an end in themselves: any short-term program that can be measured suddenly gains respectability just because you know how many views or likes it gets. Someone has likened it to taking crack: instant hits are everything – and it is addictive.