The Current Crisis of Attention

The modern world is facing a crisis of attention. The part most people know is that with the rise of the internet the experience of the world has been shrinking dramatically. We can instantaneously find out what is happening half-way around the world. Every person, every organization, and every community is becoming their own "feed" and we can subscribe to ALL of them. To say that there is information overload is an understatement. There is more information available here and now at every moment than anyone could possibly process or pay attention to.

One danger of this crisis is increasing framentation of society into smaller and more isolated niches. This is one way to cope with the overload. It's with deciding to either watch Fox News or subscribe to the Huffington Post and continues to be more and more constrained from there. This fragmentation leads to polarized views of the world which begin to clash more and more as they prove less and less able to be reconciled. This fragmentation makes us all more and more susceptible to the influence of extremists as our own views become unconsciously more extreme. This one way our attention gets focused, and it is obviously not good.

Another attention consolidating strategy is to fear monger. Fear is a very powerful emotion, and certainly grabs our attention, heading right for the amygdala and the brain stem, overriding rational thinking. The Bush administration has been a master of this strategy. 

If fear mongering is not your thing, then another easy strategy is to shock people by creating the equivalent of rubber necking or breaking social conventions (think intentional trainwrecks or Tropic Thunder).  Want to keep it really simple? Use sex or sexy people or things. I don't think I need to explain this one to you.

Putting these together, we can see that most of the ways people have been consolidating attention are through manipulative appeals to our reptile and monkey brains. Now, you and I are not stupid. We know how to think rationally and clearly and keep our reptile and monkey brains in check generally. 

But a problem arises when we look at our collective behavior: we find that in recent years we have more and more been manipulated by these media outlets and powers that have been appealing to our basest instincts. This makes us collective dumber than we may be individually.

What is the alternative? At an obvious level it is to try to figure out how to appeal to the higher natures of the masses in a way that still captures our attention. Easier said than done! I believe the Democrats have tried to do this in the past two elections...and failed. The Republican rhetoric and tactics have held more sway. Obama's campaign is having some more success, but they are not there yet really.

Aside from these massive efforts at gathering attention, I have seen much more local efforts to consolidate attention that I believe point to a better, more inspiring future. I was recently at a musical event run by some 20-somethings. What was interesting to me is that periodically through the evening a few performers circulated through the room doing little mini-performances. There were no breaks between songs, so they had to find a way to gather attention to themselves in more subtle ways: and they succeeded! I don't have their skills, so I won't try to explain how they did it, but I can at least attest to its effectiveness. It was marvelous, subtle and gentle: but powerful at the same time. Their performance was like a gentle wave of attention that flowed over the audience, leaving us refreshed and enriched without feeling manipulated or used.

What a powerful paradigm for what might be possible at even larger scales! 

I had some similar experiences at this year's Burning Man event in Nevada. First I should explain something about the nature of the event for those who haven't been. Once you are through the gate, you cannot use money to buy or sell anything. This creates more of a gift economy where people choose to share their supplies or their art with others. It's the pay it forward model and it generally works.  Some people spend months raising money and preparing their art installations just to share them with others. There is bno central program to Burning Man: it is "open sourced." the organizers just help people find an open niche and everything else flows naturally. There are many interpretations of what the Burning Man means, but one of them is the end of the "rockstar" era and the beginning of the collective creation area. We do not need one or a few individuals to look to anymore: we can create ourselves and share it with each other. It is a more peer to peer arrangement that becomes possible when are willing to give up on the rockstar and go out on our own. We burn "the Man" to represent our break from the rockstar model.

We are not quite there yet. This is another sad byproduct of the current state of our maturing with the internet: before we can really move to a more peer relationship, we will find that control gets even more centralized for a while. (Thomas Malone's The Future of Work talks about some of this, if I remember correctly.) 

(As an aside, I believe a gift economy may be a viable alternative to our curernt manipulative economy. People can choose to offer things from their heart and share them, and receive in return. This is contrast with the system of doing work you hate in order to be able to pay for things you don't really need but that abusive marketing makes you think you need. The parallel are similar to the shifts in attention I am describing and will probably go hand in hand.)

Back to Burning Man: there is so much going on, subtle yet compelling tools of attention gathering are needed and are being developed further year by year. Instead of the audience looking up at the audience, we are all the audience and all the rockstars, and things come at you from all sides. Sometimes various contributions spontaneously begin to merge into one "piece" although this was not planned. It is a function of adaptation and the intention to play with each other and co-create.

So I see this as our challenge: we need to take back control of our minds and we should seek to invent playful, beautiful, fun, non-harmful, non-manipulative ways of focusing our attention at all scales. If we practice this, we are simultaneously creating a wonderful future full of fun, more of what we want and less of what we don't. This requires an approach guided by the principles of experimentation and intuition coupled with our personal aesthetics. We need to give people some better to look at and participate with than the crap the reptile- and monkey-brain people are throwing at us.  Start local and see what happens! You might yourself swept up in a wave of positive co-creation before you know it. :)