We aren’t simply passive observers when it comes to deciding which of your digital memes to remember for later and which to let slide from working memory. We can’t be. Just as it is with our choice of where we direct our gaze, we actively decide, based on our goals of the moment, whether each piece of incoming information is a meaningful “signal” to be attended to and encoded, or a “noisy” distraction to be ignored.
From 1985-1995, before the Internet went mainstream, psychologists and marketers estimated that we were already making this choice among 300 bona-fide advertisements that we encountered each day, ...
