"Attention Crisis"? What is the Argument and the Evidence - DBR 071

There's an article in The New Yorker "What If The Attention Crisis Is All A Distraction" by Daniel Immerwahr. I think the attention problem (if there is one) is important for us to understand and resolve and, frankly, to have a debate about.

 

I thought I'd report out on this article, and the state of play. Where are we? What's the evidence? How do we form an opinion on what's going on with society on this front?

 

My foundation for engaging in the debate: I think attention is the fundamental productive commodity in our current economy. I think as knowledge workers, our attention is what we use to make our economic productive way through life. It's how we create value and and the means by which we we earn our food.

 

Drucker's hypothesis: American economic growth that we experienced in the 20th century was based on huge increases in in labor productivity. Therefore if we're going to maintain our economic growth level, then we've got to do the same thing with knowledge work. We have to increase the productivity of knowledge workers

 

So our ability to deploy and manage our attention is important, both for us as individuals and also for the economic society at large. Do we have a problem with increasingly short attention spans?

 

 Our question

• Work, particularly knowledge work, requires that we pay attention to it for periods of time.
• I'm mostly interested in the impact of attention on on work and economic productivity.
• I think that things that that interfere with our ability to focus for extended periods of time, hurts us.
• Humans have always been distractible and have needed to be taught to have an attention span of any duration

What does attention span mean? (Based on: The Distracted Mind, 2016, Gazzaley & Rosen)

• Attention is fundamentally selective - it has an object.
• The persistence of this selectivity is what we mean by attention span
• Therefore, logically it includes the ability to to block out other things
• So-called “compelled attention" interferes with our ability to block out

Attention Crisis? Really? There have been attention crises prior to the modern version.

• Plato didn't like the technology of writing
• "Amusing Ourselves To Death", Neil Postman, 1985. The threat of TV
• "The Shallows", Nicholas Carr, 2010. The threat of the internet
• "The Sirens Call", Chris Hayes, 2024. The threat of active technology

Hayes

• Attention is a commodity – it gets captured and sold to people who want us to buy something
• We have a thing called “compelled attention” (involuntary attention)
• “Attention engineering” is not a new thing, but its intensity is increasing as the value of attention increases
• We’re “Penned into a way of paying attention that we don’t like”

Immerwahr

• The data are equivocal and “distracted from one thing is to attend to another”
• Increasing length of movies, television, and video games as evidence that our attention spans are not shrinking
• The hand wringing comes from elite “attentionistas” who are in the old-school attention business

My thoughts

• Sometimes we must pay attention to that which is not attention grabbing, like work
• Advertising is monetized attention and is growing
• When it comes to utilizing our brains and our attention in functional ways, I think a decrease in the ability to sustain attention is bad.
• My concern is whether or not we control our own attention
• If we're gonna think well, then we have to think in long sequences. That's challenging to us

So attention span is important.

The good news is that we can work on maintaining our attention and focus in the face of "Compelled Attention" and any shortening attention span. I offer coaching, Attention Compass implementation training, and this podcast as ways for you to combat the theft of your attention and the negative consequences for knowledge workers.