Learning to pay attention

I’m learning, rather oddly, to pay attention.

Sounds boring, right? Yes! It is.

I’m learning to consider things before my eyes, for longer without thinking of distractions. I’m learning to read all the words on a page and internalize what they mean. I’m learning to make up my mind slowly and with facts and to question my biases. I’m learning, to game the attention economy.

The attention economy is a growing industry across the world. Global companies like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and Instagram are thriving mostly on the attention economy. The ability to capture a person’s imagination – and the length of that capture – are being sold to advertising companies.

The YouTube channels with the most views are quickly being monetized and pumped up with adverts. Truly, whilst many people say we are going through an industrial revolution, what it is that we are truly witnessing is a shift in the attention economy that is firmly on the steering wheel.

I used to suffer major attention deficit. I’d find myself in a meeting thumbing up my phone to respond to messages, I’d find myself, in the middle of a good book, meandering onto an Instagram post and then an hour later, fully engaged on the phone.

This made my tasks harder to execute and made me sloppy at many things. For one, it made me a bad driver. I’d be in the traffic and pick up my phone to check my socials – and that is a disaster portending for many young people today.

Truly, the attention deficit among the younger generation is forcing a tough shift in priorities. In our editorial meetings, it's now often a significant question of how can we shorten content, and make it more engaging for our ‘audiences’?

The standard TV news package has come down from 5 minutes in the last five years to now 3 minutes.  The standard news story has been cut from 500 – 1000 words to now 250 words and shorter.

The bigger worry for the deficit in attention is that it’s made building any form of bridge impossible. It’s made conversation – particularly online – unhelpful and distasteful. Many folks are listening to reply rather than doing so to understand.

People firmly fixed in their beliefs are in higher attention deficit when those beliefs are questioned. They are less inclined to hear the actual challenge to the beliefs but resort to pre-established biases.

You’ll have heard, for example, in a debate people being referred to as ‘regime apologists’ for trying to understand a government position or as an ‘enemy of government’ for disagreeing with a government position.

That attention deficit also reflects a national scale when soldiers forget the role of a constitution in governing national politics or when people forget the very first lines of our constitution that insist we must recall our history characterized by political and constitutional instability.

I’m learning to pay attention to things like that and I’m hoping a lot more of us pay attention too. It might help us avert a catastrophe.