They were not as neat, but the expert languages that took their grammars from the natural language can also handily notated vast amounts of attention. If one moves to a medium in which this kind of attention becomes impossible, the loss in terms of quantity of what can be known is immense. The surface that appears is distraction. The great questions now are not profound, not how this piece connects to the depths, but how the this surface connects with other regions of the surface. For the DEEP thinker, the surface is seen as distraction to be overcome or conceded to as a place of relaxation.
Focused attention is the attention of the expert.
We must develop the techniques not of focus, centering, concentration, but of expansion across surfaces. Socrates thought that knowledge of that which changes could not be knowledge. Surfaces however are temporal. Images are in time, as jumpy as a TV image when the satellite is slightly off beam. One can of course love the noise, sink into the chaos.