Attention Deficit Denial (ADD II)

The New York Times ran a story this morning headlined (in the Times Digest) Secretary of State Leads from Shadows. The essence the article tells that Rex Tillerson has avoided media exposure since becoming Secretary of State. “In the light” means being on TV; “in the shadows” spells obscurity and hence, in the eyes of media, a lack of importance.

Years ago, already, it had occurred to me that celebrity is a curse—indeed a burden. And Tillerson, who will turn 65 on March 23, has spent his life in the shadows. He graduated from college in 1975. That same year he joined Exxon as an engineer, and stayed with that employer until his swearing in as Secretary of State in 2017. If experience forms our habits, it must be difficult to become a creature of the limelight overnight. So Tillerson must be comfortable in being invisible—whereas a political animal, like Donald Trump, must wake every morning wondering what he can do to be the center of the news today—rather than what he must do.

Attention is addictive. Once addicted to attention, it must be painful just to be oneself. No crowds of journalists, no flashing lights, no shouted questions. No cameras when one walks to one’s own plane. No need to point a finger at a person (invisible to the camera). What pain to be just human.

But Fame has its benefits. I remember once reading an historian who said that any person, no matter how obscure, observed in public to hold conversation with Louis XIV, was sure to become rich very soon. For me that told the whole story of celebrity. One can work out how that happens—how contact with power can render one powerful. The mystery (and emptiness) of such derived power also struck me at the time, and I made the resolve to avoid Louis XIV if he ever comes into my view. As for Tillerson, it will be interesting to see if he is still in the shadows when his time has come to fade away...

The Lens of Attention

Attention is a magnifier—and a kind of resource. That on which we focus becomes large and hence important. The neglected largely disappears. We’re biologically programmed to notice change and, to conserve resources, to ignore that which just stays the same. But let me single out one word above: important. If attention bestows importance, those who wish to be, important, strive to get attention—and they do so ultimately by hyping threats or pleasures.

This after some days away, almost devoid of media, drawn by company, the new, the strange, the beautiful. Libya, Syria, elections? The moon-rise over Grand Traverse Bay—and a night-sky filled with stars, so rarely visible in detro-metro-land: they had our attention.

When Monique worked in cement and therefore barges struggling up the Mississippi were important, conditions on the river all the way down to distant New Orleans figured very large in our lives. Now working on the publishing plantation, news that McGraw-Hill is about to dump its core business, textbooks, is on a par with tornadoes in the south or floods in Missouri. Attention is the lens. It goes where we live. It magnifies into giants what countless others do not even see.

Libya, Syria, elections? Are you really all that crucially important for us, here, essentially powerless to do anything concrete? They seem to be because to have the power, people need the attention of the masses—and the media, its social dispenser, beats its endless drums to catch our vague attention—by threats or fake triumphs (We’ve won in Libya)—ultimately to sell eyeballs to advertisers who hope and pray that we will buy.

Scan, Surf, Read

Functionally the Internet is like a paper and unlike a book. Papers can be scanned; books must be read. The very organization of a paper—with headlines, subheads—facilitates scanning. In the old days the lead paragraph was still uniformly a kind of digest or summary of the longer story that followed—so that the scanning eye could rapidly orient itself and choose to read or skip.

This act of survey, the act of quick examination, search, of scanning, the scan of the horizon is in part preparation for concentrated attention to some detail that, in the person’s personal context, signals the need to focus. In part it is a kind of on-going orientation in which the rapid, almost automatic noting of the same-old, same-old is as much a part of the act as the detection of significance, meaning the detection of unusual, noteworthy change.

Reading—even of a story in the paper—produces a different state. The quality of the attention changes. It’s perceptible; it’s a physical sensation. The sensation of motion, of gliding, of almost flying motion stops. A gathering of force is felt. The attention thickens and deepens. The perception of time also undergoes a change.

The physiology of this process, of this difference—between scanning or surfing and reading—is worth some careful consideration. In the scanning, in the surfing process the individual is open to stimulus, indeed is seeking it. He or she is out there, in the world, engaged. The richer that world, the more it changes, the more frequently new stimuli appear to draw the eye, the more engaging the mere survey becomes. And individual items, in that flow, however enticing they might appear to be, always suffer a kind of discount—because the next thing over might be more interesting.

Now, by contrast, to deepen concentration sufficiently to read an item is to leave the world, to go within, to descend, as it were, from a moving surface to a place where motion seems to stop and a kind of silence reigns. A short little item, in this context, is less threatening than a long one—because it promises rapid release so that the breathless scanning can resume.

Unless the person engaged in this activity has long since learned that seclusion from the world can bring much greater delights than skimming the surface—and has developed the necessary skills of discipline and concentration to get value from the process—the very medium in which information is presented will influence both its use (or non-use) and its presentation. I think it is a truism that more people “read” newspapers than books—and that the Internet is causing the slow demise of its printed counter-part. And on the Internet itself, the shorter the message, the more likely that it will reap a rich harvest of hits. New devices for “keeping in touch” are the hottest consumer products—and they prove that the most compelling “information” is information about our friends. As for institutions, even the most somber now have their Twitter feeds. Oh yes. The spelling must be streamlined too. And formality signals “out of it.”  In  that spirit I will close here, sayin’: See ya l8er, alig8er…

Attention Span

That last made me think about the attention span of Ghulf Genes visitors (I don’t mean you, Rare Exception) which is just long enough frantically to click on something else. But I better stop now lest I lose that most precious of all commodities, the momentary gaze of someone unknown, from somewhere undetected, brought here by Google’s magic or by Next Blog, and rushing on at light speed to bestow a nanosecond of his or her weightless attention on some other breathlessly quivering cobweb…

The Eye and the Beholder

Many years ago now, engaged in a study of packaging on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, I got involved with bottles-and-cans. That phrase became shorthand, later, for a significant uproar across the environmental community dealing with beverage containers, their discard as litter, and efforts to force industry to reclaim and to recycle them. In studying this matter I visited Coca Cola in order to understand better how this aspect of packaging worked. In that process I came to marvel. The more I learned about the subject, the more it expanded. An empty, bent, carelessly discarded small container along the roadside—barely seen as we drive by it—morphed into a vast commercial, engineering, and manufacturing colossus which was the central concern, indeed the living, of thousands of people across the United States. I came to think of these containers as the uniformed armies of the two great competing empires of Sugar-Water, and, indeed, later on, having visited the one in Atlanta I also traveled to upstate New York, and there I was appropriately awed by the glorious glass palace that housed Pepsi, the other.

Who says that life in business is a dull affair? You drive away from such a setting in the green-gold countryside at the wheel of your red Avis on a brilliant fall day, having admired very fine art on display in a vast building-circumambulating lobby, and you think yourself magically transported into another medieval time of duchies and princedoms, the dukes and princes of whom are powerful figures who visit—or are visited by—senators and presidential aides, and in your thoughts, as the palace falls behind you and the black ribbon of the road bisects breathtaking woods, you wonder what a strange thing it might be to expend your efforts serving Sugar Water, travelling over oceans in shiny airplanes on its behalf…and realizing that this strange notion may never ever occur to Sugar Water’s actual minions who, bless them, just think of what they do as the same-old-same-old-same-old job.

I was reminded of the strange, lens-like character of attention in the context of yesterday’s post about living in multiple mental worlds. Our ability to pay attention to many quite different realities would seem to have a scattering, a centrifugal force. Here is time spent on complex technical problems (at work), the right wine for the chosen meat (shopping), the matter-form duality underlying Aristotle’s concept of substance and the peculiar habitation of unformed matter and immaterial form (reading), and then (Saturday night) immersed in experience of the music and the husky words of the creator of Thunder Road. Oh my. Yes, indeed. And the loom to weave all this into a fabric?

As the world infinitely expands, proliferates, and complexifies the more we stare at it, as at every blink that gets us closer it only unfurls yet another even greater fractal layer of yet another depth of intricacy—or as this same complexity curls up into a simple object, then shrinks into a token, then turns into a concept, and then may actually disappear as we withdraw our attention—all this while that which is behind the attention remains the only fixed and immutable point. And that point—we can’t actually get at it at all—is ourselves. It does the weaving. How we do it, how well we do it, that is the crux of the matter.

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Thunder Road bring memories? A puzzlement? To hear the song, click here. To read the lyrics, here. The combined effect of words and music will not be revealed, I don’t think, by close study, however intense, of either one or the other, no matter how well conducted.

Mysterious Attention

William James devotes fifty pages to the subject of attention in his two-volume Principles of Psychology. In my version of this 1890 work, published by Henry Holt and Company in 1923, the chapter begins on page 402 of Volume I. James calls attention an act of the mind. The mind concentrates on one of many objects—lifts it out from the undifferentiated flux of experience. He names attention’s opposite distraction or, citing the German word, Zerstreutheit, a word that literally means “state of scatter.” James continues to hew to this theme throughout the chapter. His focus is the act of bestowing attention. But the mystery of attention, for me, arises when I think about the object of attention, especially when that object is a human being. Why people pay attention is clear enough; why they seek attention is a little more fuzzy.

I notice, however, that once I frame the question, the answer begins to crystallize. The need to get attention appears to be the exact mirror of the need to pay attention. The agent who looks at something makes it more real—for him or for herself. The person noticed by the agent, similarly, becomes more real for being noticed. When I look at you, you become more real in your own subjective perception of yourself; when you respond by acknowledging my attention, I become more real in my perception of me.

Curious, in a way. We benefit from the confirmation of our own being by the attention of another. Merely to know that we are—as we surely do know, after all we are self-conscious—doesn’t seem to be enough. Arguably this has a practical grounding. If I want someone to act on my behalf, I have to draw his or her attention. Therefore babies cry. But experience teaches that attention has value in and of itself, yes, even when no practical pay-offs are present. People need attention in order to have psychic health. That’s why we must pay attention even to those who can’t repay the attention we bestow in practical coin. The lonely teen, the aging person, the single mother: they all need attention. When it is given, they come alive; when denied, they wither. Attention is a kind of sunlight.

Yet another aspect of attention supports the structure of our public communications. In order for me to influence you, I have to have your attention first. Therefore, in the project of having my own way, I must be sharply visible (not submerged in the flux), I must be noticed, my aim must be understood, and it must seduce you, in some way, to act along the pathways I suggests—rather than as my opponent does.

Serious journalism—let’s call it “beyond pamphleteering”—was based on the notion that unusual events, objectively reported, would draw the public’s attention and in turn result in reasonable actions as called for by the facts. Reporting on events was the foundation of this profession, “events” here defined as things that had actually happened, not merely things said. Journalism has drifted from that model for three reasons. Reporting on real events is costly. Genuinely newsworthy events are actually rare; it is therefore difficult to fill a daily paper, and never mind a 24/7 television cycle, with real news. Finally, the public has learned to feed the media with an alternative content which is sufficient for ordinary purposes, more or less: self-promotion. Thus the news, so-called, consist of seven parts fluff and three parts reported happenings. The fluff consists of commentaries by high-profile people on probabilities that may never be realized; we hear about intentions; we hear about possible future alliances or breakups; we are presented endless so-called analysis, not of events but of vague trends, pronouncements, and outcomes in the foggy future.

The payoff in all this is a little vague. But those in the news certainly feel that they’re more real than those who never get their ten-seconds of glory in the limelight. And some of those who do—as for instance ordinary people embroiled in some news event—become addicted to this radiance and make valiant attempts to stay in it by forming public action committees, associations, pressure and interest groups. This suggests to me that while attention is certainly a basic human need, the modest minimum we need is best obtained through friends and family. In its mechanized forms it is dangerous to our psychic health.