ATTENTION!! Literally. Attention. This is an issue for all of us.
“Information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” – Herbert Simon, total badass.
“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James
Thank you, John B, for sending this piece from 2020 my way. Titled “The Erosion of Deep Literacy,” it maps nicely onto some of the other trails I’ve been meandering down, looking for the source of the proverbial Nile. We see the effects of political gridlock, socio-economic issues, environmental changes in the form of temperature and extreme weather, the decline of religiosity and the rise of polarizing belief systems on the left and right. The decline of deep literacy ties directly into the splintering of our attention spans.
The Watchman’s Rattle talks about how when the complexity of the environment outpaces our ability to collectively make sense of it, human groups run into problems. Stolen Focus, Reader, Come Home, and The Shallows highlight how our attention has been fragmented, hindering our ability to focus deeply and for long periods of time. The Your Undivided Attention Podcast and The Attention Merchants discuss the commodification of human attention throughout history, how “time on site,” “user engagement,” and the worship of growth at all cost has come to give birth to the current toxic social media environment. No doubt I am leaving out many thinkers who are also calling attention (pun unintended but dad joke hilarious nonetheless) to this problem.
This week someone commented to me that people are still reading the same amount; it’s just distributed in different ways. For example, reading online news and social media, scrolling twitter feeds and threads. I understand the comparison, but upon closer examination the idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s the difference between swimming in the rough waters of an ocean versus the kid’s end of the pool.
I see it in myself, where I find myself reading less pages a week without disciplined effort. I see it in the freshmen at college, with professors (including myself) reluctant to assign long books and readings. And as I hear about grade schoolteachers, I see it there as well. Some of that is pandemic driven, no doubt, just another factor exacerbating our already degraded attention span.
From the “Erosion of Deep Literacy” piece:
“We ask our stone-age brains to sort, categorize, parse, and prioritize torrential data streams it never evolved to juggle, while in the background we have to stay ever vigilant to change in every sensory channel....Screens of all sorts serve up rapidly changing images, jump cuts between scenes, erratic motion, and non-linear narratives that spill out in fragments....Is it any wonder people today complain of mental fatigue? Fatigue makes it even harder to sort the trivial from the salient and navigate the glut of decisions modern life throws at us.”
“Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships.... A book is a large intellectual construction; you can't hold it all in mind easily or at once. You must struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge. People are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface.... This new thinking erases context. It disaggregates everything. All this makes strategic thinking about world order nearly impossible to achieve.”
What to do, what to do….
At the individual level, books like Deep Work and Hyper Focus point to possible pathways forward. Know thyself. Figure out when your individual energy pattern is highest. Invariably it will be early morning or late evening. Block off that time and jealously guard it, use it to knock out your high percentage tasks. Essentialism discusses how to strip away the unnecessary. In the words of Ron Swanson, “Don’t half ass two things. Whole ass one thing.” Ruthlessly pare away the distractions. Carve out time, even if it’s only ten or twenty minutes a day. It will add up. It's not about being a luddite or a monk. Find a moderate balance. Get outside, unplug in the woods. Breathe.
At the larger group level, we must redesign these technological platforms that assume greater import in our lives as time progresses. If they must be paid services, so be it. I would much rather pay for a subscription social media service rather than have them fund it by harvesting my attention and data (which is a whole other topic we’ll just put a pin in for now). You are going to pay the bill somehow. You will pay it with attention capture and personal information, or with money. It will be up to individuals to make that calculation. Maybe there should be an NPR type social media that is not for profit. I don’t know. What I do know is that what we have now is a not serving the humans that use it very well. Tristan Harris is one of the people to watch to discern an ethical path forward.
The answer is clearly not unplugging and heading for the woods, as enticing as that could be. It appears that humanity is creating a worldwide model of distributed cognition, each of us neurons in a larger whole. If that’s the case, let’s make those neurons just a little more thoughtful, yeah?
And if we don’t? I think Mike Judge showed us a possible ending to this story….