Beauty Shot

Why Are You (Not) Paying Attention to This?

Attention, why it matters, and what might happen, individually and collectively, if we spent our attention differently.

This last week, Axios’s Scott Rosenberg noted a post-Trump contraction of the attention economy. “Donald Trump used social media to provoke and distract Americans around the clock, rewiring the country’s nervous system and diminishing the value of each individual news cycle. Now we’re going to learn whether our fried collective circuits can recover.” Not only does Biden tweet (a lot) less, but people tweet about Biden less. Rosenberg posited two possible paths forward for anyone seeking attention at scale: 1) Do what Trump did, amping up rhetoric and exploiting information-overload dynamics, or 2) “reset public-square norms [with] simpler, straighter talk at lower volume.”

Michael Goldhaber, who helped to cement the term “attention economy” in popular culture, says that the attention economy benefits the shameless among us most. “Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it.” Consequently, “the value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.” According to him, the attack on the U.S. Capitol in early 2021 was due to different groups competing for attention, and manufacturing and sharing dangerous conspiracy theories in order to amplify outrage. Opinion writer Charlie Warzel summarizes it perfectly: “Those who can collectively commandeer enough attention can accumulate a staggering amount of power quickly. And it’s never been easier to do than it is right now.”

The concept of an “attention economy” dates back to the 1970s, was popularized in the ‘90s, when the web was in its infancy, and seems relevant to every discussion, on any topic, every day now. I was reminded of a comment the philosopher and computer scientist Jaron Lanier made in a podcast interview with tech journalist Kara Swisher two years ago: “If you’re privileged enough to have the option of walking away from social media, and yet you don’t, you’re failing to use your privilege to defeat a system that traps other people who are less fortunate than you.”

It’s a startling claim, really, in the context of hyper-individualized American culture. Is he saying we owe it to others not to use social media if we can at all avoid it?

That an economic system that rewards those who suck up all the attention they can, that distracts them from more worthy pursuits, is unsustainable, possibly immoral, and it doesn’t matter whether you happen to like social media personally?

One of the impeachment managers in the U.S. House, Jamie Raskin, tragically lost his twenty-five-year-old son Tommy on December 31, 2020, and in the comments Raskin and his wife delivered in their son’s memory, they recalled this about him:

“When we lost him, he had not only beloved friends at Harvard Law School but he was teaching a course with Michael Sandel, Justice, as a teaching fellow at the college so he had students of his own, and graded all of his papers and exams and wrote many pages analyzing the work of the students and writing back to them. He made donations in each of their names to different charitable groups that he thought would be consistent with the values of the student. So some of them went to Give Directly and to Oxfam and so on. I asked him why he did that, and he quoted something that Father Berrigan had said about the great Dorothy Day. He said ‘well, like Father Berrigan said about Dorothy Day, she lived as if the truth were true,’ and he said, ‘I want to show them that the truth is true, and we can live that way.’”

You don’t have to agree with Lanier, or desire his advice—his latest book is called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now—to undertake this thought experiment, and ask: If you had more attention to give, who would get it? Companies blocking their employees’ unionization efforts? South Africa received its first COVID-19 vaccinations just this past week, and The Economist Intelligence Unit reports that the populations of more than 85 poorer countries “will not have widespread access to coronavirus vaccines before 2023.” Meanwhile, a McKinsey survey found that 25% of women surveyed find working and having a home life, under the realities of COVID-19, to be completely unsustainable. And every few months something in city life reminds me of this (to my thinking) perfect use of social media—the columnist Ciara O’Connor’s righteously angry Twitter tirade about navigating an Olafur Eliasson exhibit at the Tate Modern in a wheelchair:

“I never get to lose myself in a picture, or wander in a reverie,” she writes. “I am always, ALWAYS aware of my body, how it’s blocking people, how it’s taking up space, how it’s inconvenient and cumbersome. Most of what I say in museums or galleries is this: ooh, sorry! Sorry. Excuse me, sorry! Thanks, sorry, could I just? I’m behind you! Careful! Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I’m constantly apologizing for existing in those spaces, saying sorry for my body.”

Now of course us knowing something doesn’t change anything. Heightened awareness can’t address inequities in and of itself. But knowledge plus focus, time, and devotion can change a lot.

This Beauty Shot is about attention, why it matters, and invites us to consider what might happen, individually and collectively, if we spent our attention differently. We’ve all seen the #deletefacebook hashtag, and most of us haven’t deleted it or Instagram. But what if we lived as if the truth as touted by tech ethicist Tristan Harris and all the social media doomsayers were true, at least for a while?

—Megan Hustad

Continuous partial attention

A Microsoft study found that humans lose concentration after 8 seconds, whereas a goldfish can make it to 9 seconds. A study published in Nature Communications confirms that our collective attention spans have been decreasing due to the pace of information consumption.

The attention crisis is not a new phenomenon. When Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive, coined the term “continuous partial attention” almost two decades ago, it was a Eureka moment. She characterized it as a behavioral crisis caused by “paying partial attention, continuously,” online, as we find ourselves in a permanent “artificial sense of constant crisis,” resulting in a feeling of overwhelm and stress: the modern predicament of “being constantly attuned to everything without fully concentrating on anything.” However, she distinguished it from multi-tasking, which she viewed as mostly productivity- and efficiency-driven, whereas continuous partial attention was rooted in what we might now call FOMO (Fear-of-Missing-Out).

Today continuous partial attention, driven by FOMO, is the foundation of entire business models, from TikTok to Clubhouse. The point is to drop in and out, with emotional consequences not just for consumers but also for “passion economy” creators, hosts, newsletter writers, and other digital micropreneurs who need to cope with ever-changing algorithms to reach an ever more fickle followership.

If attention is an act of love, then today’s social media confronts us with constant break-ups, a string of micro-heartbreaks. With the middleman removed, creators become street musicians, and their value (and often, self-esteem) is a matter of the immediate attention they can generate and the value into which they can convert it. In a piece for The New Yorker on the Substack economy, Anna Wiener quotes Maybe Baby newsletter creator Haley Nahman: “If business is down, or people are unsubscribing, it’s definitely a very direct referendum on me,” she said. “Or it feels like it.”

To discuss the relevance of her concept of “continuous partial attention” and the future of attention, we invited Linda Stone to join us this coming Tuesday, February 23, 7 pm CET, for Beautiful Business Live, our weekly room on Clubhouse.

Drop in here (and please stay!)

Fake attention

While attention is the currency of the digital economy, researchers contend that more than half of web traffic is fraudulent, generated by bots and “click farms.” This is creating a “subprime” advertising market and costing advertisers billions of dollars.

Case in point: One week after Netflix began streaming the film The Irishman, the company reported that 26.4 million households had watched the 3.5 hour-long feature to at least 70% completion. In contrast, independent measurement firm Nielsen estimated that the film in fact drew half that audience (13.2 million viewers) during that period.

Broken attention (economics)

The media entrepreneur and investor Joe Marchese believes the attention economy is broken, and not just because of fraud. It is “inefficient and not properly pricing negative externalities. Businesses with quality attention are undervalued, and others are losing value by chasing meaningless metrics,” he writes.

Making things worse is that “we have abdicated our responsibility for curating what is worthy of a fellow human’s attention to AI, which, in turn, is optimizing only for immediate engagement and advertising margin.”

When “fracking for eyeballs,” he points out, content neither has to be true nor enhances our wellbeing. In fact, due to our “negativity bias,” content that is designed to agitate or stir up negative emotions keeps our attention longer. Negative news not only garners our attention more than positive news, it is also perceived as being more truthful.

Add to that the inherent bias of AI, and the attention crisis is evident: not only are we deprived of attention, we are also deprived of our attention agency.

Aside from more public and guided research on (un)ethical AI conducted outside corporate agendas and alliances, and regulating the digital platforms and their algorithms, what can each of us do to get our attention (agency) back?

Here are some ideas:

Redirect and regenerate attention

As a business and business leader, pay attention to the weak signals, not just the strong cases. Help others see the beauty in the seemingly mundane, and shine light on the ugly, which is not-so-beautiful precisely because no one or not enough people have been paying attention.

This means four responsibilities in particular:

Use your products and services to enhance individual wellbeing through features that enhance focus and presence rather than minimizing them.
Allow your customers to manage their attention themselves rather than manipulating them into how you think they should spend it. Now, that’s a noble principle, but the reality is this: You cannot not steer their attention. There is no neutral player on the field, no attention referee.
That said, what you stand for is what your customers and employees will pay attention to. Use the power of your brand as a curator of impressions and expressions deliberately to direct attention to the unheard, unseen, and underrepresented.
And finally, ask yourself: how can you regenerate attention? That's the task for any conscious brand in the digital economy. “Is a regenerative attention economy possible?” Linda Gorchels asked in a 2019 blog post. The answer must be yes. Our life depends on it.

What if attention were regenerative, even circular? Which business models and digital services might help us create new attention resources while we are exhausting the existing ones?

Read more on “How to Be a Beautiful Business in the Attention Economy.”

Focus on the nutritious, reduce the junk

Whether is Mark Manson’s “Attention Diet,” Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, Alex Pang’s The Distraction Addiction, or Nir Eyal’s Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, there are myriad formulas for managing digital overload (which has all but increased during the pandemic), and they all have two things in common: identify what nurtures you online, and reduce the junk.

Reorient yourself in the “boredom economy”

The COVID-19 crisis has shown us that it’s possible to be digitally overloaded and bored at the same time. In her New York Times piece, Sydney Ember even speaks of a “boredom economy” and says it is here to stay.

May boredom be in fact a positive virtue, yes, almost a political stance?

In a seminal 1924 essay on boredom, the German sociologist Siegfried Kracauer called for radical acts of boredom, such as simply laying on the couch without any distractions, to “flirt with the ridiculous, embarrassing, unscripted ideas” and being “content to be with oneself.”

As Ben Highmore points out in a review of Kracauer’s essay, “to declare yourself bored is not a mark of failure but the necessary precondition for the possibility of generating the authentically new (rather than the old dressed up as the new).”

Don’t say a word

Recently, Cape Town-based House research analyst Marizanne Knoesen went to a Vipassana Meditation Center to perform a “surgical operation of the mind” (in the words of Vipassana teacher S.N. Goenka). Yes, it’s the same thing that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey has done, but you don’t need to be a billionaire to take part. She reports: “Vipassana works on a donation basis, where you pay it forward with what you can afford to contribute, and the meditation technique simply helps you change the mind’s habit pattern by observing the sensations in your body but not reacting to them. It teaches you that everything arises and passes away. Life follows the rule of impermanence. We can train our minds to not react and give power to the loud sensational voices that are drowning everyone and everything else out.”

Or at least never speak longer than a minute.

Or take the advice of acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton and just listen. Because in silence, everyone’s included.

Or do nothing. Adapting our behavior to use technology in a way that “suit[s] our vision of what tech should do” is a start, according to Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. We also need to “recognize when we are being guilted into giving more of our time, attention, money, etc., into products and processes that offer us insufficient ROI—and ‘doing nothing,’ which is actually doing quite a lot.”

Embrace “suchness” and ask yourself: am I weird enough?

Philosopher L. M. Sacasas, in an essay on “attention austerity” and freedom, pinpoints the root cause of the attention crisis: the Western division between subject and object. He cites the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who noted that “in ancient China and Japan subject and object were understood not as categories of opposition but of identification,” and:

“This is probably the source of the profoundly respectful descriptions of what surrounds us, of flowers, trees, landscapes, for the things we can see are somehow a part of ourselves, but only by virtue of being themselves and preserving their suchness, to use a Zen Buddhist term.”

The writer and activist Bayo Akomolafe, who will speak at our Concrete Love festival, proposes a related set of questions:

“What if the ways we frame and meet our most troubling crises are part of the crises?
What lingers in our blind spots, disturbing the supposed incontrovertibility of seeing?
What are we missing?
What questions are we not able to ask?
What if we are not weird enough?
And are there other spaces of power in partnership with the world—borne from other ways of relating with objects around us—which we can access?”