What Price Do We Pay For The Attention Economy?
“Take what you want said God. Take it and pay for it.” Old Spanish Proverb
Sue and I are preparing for a short Algonquin Park anniversary getaway. It’s been a busy period and we both feel the need for a break. Ruby is coming along – so there’s that.
Just prior to our departure, I witness Sue’s calls, text messaging, scribbled notes, and snakes & ladders spurts through the house. It’s something else.
“I’m never doing just one thing. You can’t multitask like I do,” Sue tells me as she flies past, phone in one hand and bag of cat treats in the other. “And I’ll tell you this much, multitasking is exhausting!”
She’s right. I don’t multitask nearly as well as Sue does. And like her – as I try to squeeze in my daily Wordle before putting our suitcase in the truck – I find multitasking utterly exhausting.
If the ‘Devil is in the details,’ life these days is downright demonic. We’re overrun by digital distraction and dozens of dastardly details.
The 21st century doesn’t have any industry, renewable energy, or even information driving its economy. It’s all about attention.
In the 1970’s Nobel Laureate, psychologist, and economist, Herbert A. Simon, first came up with the term “attention economy.” He argued that attention is the “bottleneck of human thought” and that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
His prescience was remarkable. But I would argue that instead of a ‘wealth’ of information what we have today is a cesspool-tsunami. Case in point: hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute while millions of comments, posts, and photos are added to Facebook. Dare I say, it doesn’t amount to a single Michener nomination?
We are choking on an ever-expanding firehose of information on addictive portable devices – digital data is estimated to double every two years – yet our human capacity to drink it in remains finite.
The tension between the abundance of information and scarcity of attention makes this attention economy ferocious and utterly ruthless. With no barriers to entry, the imperfect standards from the ink-on-paper era of fact-checking and good reporting are a thing of the past. The Internet weed bed, loosely attended to by duplicitous algorithms, has no norms, guardrails, nor moral compass.
A behemoth of the attention economy, Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram), knows exactly what it’s doing. Founder, Mark Zuckerberg, knows what his products do to the mental health of teenagers. He’s known it for years. But in the cut-throat competition of the attention economy, he dares not take a step back and think of the common good.
Meta whistle-blowers have even handed over the smoking guns. When Zuckerberg was told long ago about the addictive power of his platforms and the damage they do, did he blush? Did he even shrug?
No, he did neither. In fact, when faced with legislative projects to force social media companies to vet their products before rolling them out to children, he didn’t embrace the opportunity to create a new, safer level playing field. Instead, he hired more lobbyists to strangle any efforts in the crib.
But today, I’m not going to fix social media.
No, today, we’re on a lovely drive and the weather could not be better. We wind around the curves and hills of The King’s Highway 60, surrounded by lakes and forests, and our cell signal becomes spotty. Sue and I agree that this must be a sign. We’re meant to disconnect in order to reconnect. As we arrive at our Algonquin cabin, Ruby sits up from her back seat slumber and nods in approval. So does Sue.
White wine, whisky – and finally, a chance to pay attention.
Two Muskoka chairs on the deck face the beauty of creation. A glass of Chardonnay for Sue and a tumbler of whisky for me. We appreciate the serenity of the lake and the hummingbirds that periodically dance in and out of our view.
Ruby lies down in front to stare at the vista. Her movements limited to a periodic raised eyebrow at a sound from the bush or the loon on the lake.
Away from the concerns of daily life – and without a reliable wi-fi connection – my inner thoughts turn to the idea of really paying attention. I look at Sue and make eye contact. I smile. I hold my chin in my hand. I tell myself: I’m really paying attention… aren’t I? Then I worry… Am I simply performing what paying attention should look like? I wonder, is it possible to pay attention and think about paying attention at the same time. I conclude that even the most honourable of intentions are mixed.
Sue notices my lost gaze. “What are you thinking about?” she asks.
“You’re right,” I tell her. “I don’t multitask like you do. But I think the entire notion of multitasking might be a myth. Can we ever do more than one thing at a time… Maybe we’re just shifting between tasks at an unsustainable pace. Like just now… I’m paying attention to you and thinking about paying attention to you – but I can’t do both at the same time. I can’t even multitask these two related ideas.”
Sue grins and pats my hand. “Honey, I’m not sure if you’re thinking too much or not quite enough.”
“It’s not that complicated,” she adds. “If you’re paying attention to someone. You ask them questions. You look at them… don’t you?”
“I wonder,” I say to Sue. “How often at social gatherings do I stay inside my head avoiding the risk of awkward conversation instead of asking questions of others? Or, worse, how often do I ask a question only because I want to tell you my version of the answer? In fact, how often am I guilty of not even listening to your reply or even cut you off midsentence so that I can dazzle with my own story?”
Am I paying attention?
What does it mean to truly pay attention? We all think we know the answer to the question. But do we really?
French philosopher, Simone Weil, saw attention as the cornerstone of our humanity – she called it ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity.’
“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object… Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Simone Weil
How can we expect to achieve Weil’s level of mindfulness when we’re bombarded by the addictive distractions of the attention economy?
Inspired by Weil’s writings on attention, British writer & philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote of the need for our ‘fat relentless ego’ to get out of the way. In other words, to truly pay attention, to receive and be open to someone else, we need to silence our inner thoughts, neuter our preconceptions, and shut down the insecurities of our ego.
Weil saw her pure interpretation of attention as the substance of both divine and brotherly love. “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.”
The sun is setting and the loon wails – both haunting and gorgeous. We polish off the first round of wine and whisky and position a charcuterie board on the table between our chairs. Ruby sniffs the air and gets up to move closer. Sue gives her a cracker.
“Ruby only ever does one thing at a time,” I observe. “The attention she pays and the love in her eyes, while disturbingly effective, is certainly not performative.”
“We need to learn to love and pay attention like Ruby does – like a child,” Sue replies.
It’s true. The attention economy pushes us away from one another. And the price we pay for it is our humanity.
