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. :)

Double lives

It seems to me that all over the planet people are forced to live a variety of double lives. The lives vary by country, culture and region, but it seems a fixture of human life to have such lives. We have a range of double lives from  evangelical pastors who use prostitutes to people who have affairs while married to people who use illegal drugs to people who are closet smokers to people that have secret hobbies and those who pinch every penny but also escape to casinos from time to time.

What is the root of this behavior? On the surface, it seems like it would be best to be able to live fully integrated lives. Is it unavoidable? Is it good or bad? 

Every culture has its taboos, those things that are socially unacceptable, as well as those things it praises and holds up as ideals. And it is certainly good to have limits on some behaviors (the most obvious being things like murder). And it also seems like a great idea to have aspirations and ideals that inspire us to be our best selves. Because the reality is that humans are imperfect. Fundamentally we are animals, prone to the influences of our "monkey" and "reptile" brains above our better judgment from time to time. Ideals remind us to keep these more base impulses under control as much as possible. 

But on the other hand, if we turn ideals into notions of rigid right and wrong, where some things are totally forbidden despite evidence that they are strongly imbedded in human nature, it seems like we are setting the stage for failure, double lives and repression that can erupt into massive social dysfunction if held down too long. 

It seems like we could benefit from a gentler relationship to these ideals, that acknowledges them to be just that, and that they are something to strive for and some times miss. In that environment, people would be more inclined to discuss their "shadow side" more openly, and that discussion can be the source of solutions, comfort and a renewed commitment to keep trying. 

And if we find that many people are struggling in the same ways, we can make a conscious choice to either not aim so high because it is causing undue stress, or to restructure the ideals to more intelligently take into consideration our human natures, or to identify certain subsets of people that need special attention. The bad news is that we don't have a good history of this kind of compassion for others and human failings. But I think we can strive to do better. 

First off, I would throw out the notions of "right" and "wrong" as too rigid and prone to creating problems. I might replace it with the idea of "what works for us" to keep a focus on functional behavior without the punative aspects. And perhaps elevate the notions of "aspiration" and "compassion" to allow for the ideal to exist in a flexible way that inspires more people to keep trying rather than give up. A tricky thing in this plan is that there will be a continuum of how easy attaining these aspirations will be for people. If we could look at these things openly rather than covertly, we might be able to determine the relative distributions in the population, craft appropriate strategies and target differing interventions for different people. The goal would be to create an appropriate stretch for each individual.

In this new scheme, I think we would slowly start to see these double lives disappear and integrated people and culture start to emerge that balanced the tensions between ideals and our human frailty more. The dialectic between our cultural norms and our realized humanity would move in a positive reinforcing spiral.

I think the key aspects of making this transition are moving away from the notions of right and wrong, as well as nuance our understanding of reality and fantasy. This is a topic I would like to write about more in the future. We get into trouble when we relate to fantasy as if it were reality, or vice versa. (Just think of those dejected bridezillas after the letdown of coming home from a marriage or honeymoon.) Ideals are a form of fantasy, but we need to be realistic about them. When reality and fantasy are too far removed from each other a stress is created that is too difficult for most people to bear and they "break" one way or another. Socially, we could benefit from being more realistic about our fantasy and being more fantastical about our reality. :)

We need campaign indicators for the public

I completed the Wellstone Action campagin training about a month ago. It was very valuable for someone like me who dislikes the chaos of your typical campaign. I learned about such things as the "win number," the connection between public policy, electoral politics and grassroots organizing,  messaging, and segmenting and targeting (e.g. identifying and going after undecided or disengage voters). Now, I will not say that it is a perfect system, but it was a pretty darn good system. I might even go so far as to call it "scientific." It made sense, and even more than that, I saw that it could be possible to track your progress against your goals. That's all good.

But one thing I have noticed is missing from this year's presidential campaign, despite all the fancy online tools deployed by the Obama campaign, is an sense of whether the plan is working, or if additional intensity is needed.

For example, I am an Obama supporter. I know I will vote for him, but I am undecided about how much additional volunteering to do. Is it needed? 

I will also say that when Obama voted for the FISA bill I lost SIGNIFICANT motivation to volunteer for him. (I was not the only one. For example: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11349.html) That one vote undermined his integrity and what I believe separated him from the horrible politicians we have had in recent years. If he was going to be a "regular" politican, blowing in the political wind, then he would get "regular" support from me (e.g. a vote, but not much more). I expect him to exercise leadership and shape public opinion as needed to do the right thing, not respond to polls. And if he needs to educate me because it was the right vote, then he needs to do that and he hasn't.

 

Anyway, so now I am not very motivated to volunteer or give more money. BUT, I definitely do want him to win. So what I need to know is if the Obama strategy is on track (in terms of hitting their win number), or if things have shifted significantly and there is a real danger. Yes, I know he is (or was) behind in the polls. But I need even more information.

In particular, I need to know, given the level of support that the Obama campaign has placed me in, if I and people like me remain at that level, will he lose? From what I learned at the Wellstone Action training, I think it may be possible to actually determine this.

If the Obama campaign needs me to escalate my level of support, they need to explain their strategy to me, where I fit in, and why I need to escalate. This is doable and I believe the next step in "microtargeting." I know not everyone cares about this, but it needs to be available to people like me, and as I said above, I know I am not the only one like me.

I am regular supporter of certain causes and campaigns, but I am tired of impassioned pleas and continuous urgency about why THIS TIME WE MEAN IT! If you don't help out now all is lost! It's too much for us to bear. We need to campaigns to be honest with us, and in turn we will step up when it is truly needed. But lie to us, try to trick us, or abuse our trust even once and we will drop you like a hot potato. Thanks! Just being honest. :)