My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #28, January 12, 1998

ATTENTION DEFICIT

I was just reading an article called The Attention Economy and the Net, by Michael Goldhaber, about the overabundance of content on the net--all the competing messages, all the demands that you buy this, read that, watch this, listen to that. It wasn't content that was scarce anymore, he argued, it was attention. Everything else can multiply, but not the time anybody has available to spend reading, watching, listening. It's annoying of us, perhaps, but people insist on having lives. We won't sit there in front of a screen receiving messages all day and all night.

But it isn't just the net that is filled with competing demands for our attention. It's all the advertisers. It's the news, the politicians, the TV shows, the radio programs, the top 20 countdown. It's our jobs, our friends, our husbands, our wives, our kids. It's also our own intense need to just get away from every single demand and crawl into a hole and sit there quietly and think.

Is it just my imagination, or does all that competition for our attention make the ads louder, the politicians nastier, the news sillier, the jump cuts faster and faster, the movies ever bloodier? Are we the mule they're hitting with a 2x4 to get our attention before they try to make us go somewhere?

If so, we have a problem. In fact we have several problems. One is information overload. We can't process everything so we tune out, just mentally vanish, a state indistinguishable from being heavily drugged. Or it can be used, as David Shenk suggests in his book Data Smog, to overwhelm our resistance to specific messages, political or commercial. The constant din of demands can lead to unfocused anger, or it can lead to complete passivity, neither of which is healthy.

The real problem, though, it seems to me, is that we spread our attention over too many things. Too often, I suspect, we don't consciously choose where we want to spend it, where our attention matters the most. I am struck by those surveys that pop up from time to time saying that working women spend 3-4 hours doing housework after they get home, and spend about 11 minutes a day engaged in genuine conversation with their children.

And I am struck by the number of lost-looking children who never seem to have had enough attention paid to them. I'm not just talking about the children of the ghetto. I'm talking about the children of nice, hardworking, stressed out middle class working parents, latchkey children wandering around suburban neighborhoods aimlessly after school lets out, or staring emptily at TV screens. Were they picked on at school today? Did their best friends fail to invite them to their birthday parties? Did they say something funny and brilliant in class today, or learn something that excited them?

Too often, parents don't know, because they aren't there to be told when the kids get home from school. And when the parents do come home, if they're busy putting away groceries, fixing dinner, trying to talk to each other, they are there, but their attention is not. The chaos and atmosphere of hurry up does not invite a child to open up and share all the hurts and triumphs.

Have we lost our capacity to remember what it is like to be a child, or even a teenager, coming home needing to be comforted, or just needing to share the pleasures of the day, with somebody who cared? Who sat there and just focused on YOU? It's what turns a house into a home--focused, caring attention, time spent playing, reading outloud, talking and laughing while sharing chores. This is what gives children a sense of being valuable. It's what teaches children how people go about loving each other.

If you bring children into the world, how can you NOT spend this time with them, pay this attention? How can it possibly be more important to vacuum and do laundry at that very moment when they need you to listen? If you have to cut corners, give something short shrift, shouldn't it be the housework? The time when children need your attention most goes by so quickly, and you can't get it back later when you have a little more time available. Remember the Harry Chapin song, "The Cat's in the Cradle"--if "we'll have a good time then" is a promise that's never kept, if you're too busy when he's 2 and when he's 8 and when he's 14, he'll be too busy for you when you are 65.

But of course we haven't forgotten what it's like to be a child needing attention, because we still need attention, even when we're all grown up. It's what we all want, isn't it, when we've finished our work for the day? Somebody to care about how our day went, somebody who will in turn share his own day? When you have someone like that, how do you keep her? With that scarcest of currencies--attention. You create a quiet space amid the chaos and listen. Really listen.

I think we need to choose, from all those things that demand our attention, what matters to us the most, and spend our attention there. Someday, there's going to be a memorial service for each of us. When that day comes, do we want our bosses to be sad about how irreplaceable we are, or our husbands or wives, our family and friends? It's something to think about before we agree to work late for the fourth night in a row. It's worth thinking about before we stretch out on the couch and reach for the remote control.