Surviving Inattention in an Attention Economy
Richard Lanham has argued that in an Information Society the one great shortage is attention. You’re struggling to read even the first lines of this post, because you’re distracted by the pull of the thousand other things you might be scrolling through. The sheer optionality of digital life makes engrossment a rare commodity.
(Thanks for staying with this, by the way. You will be richly rewarded in Elysium. Or, better yet, give this article a clap, and I’ll follow you on Twitter.)
Sometimes Lanham seems only half right. There is, after all, a glut of attention in the world today — just not attention paid by or to people. As humans have become more distracted, our infrastructures and platforms have become more focused. As we have maxed out on supposed multitasking, our machines have mastered the task of unblinking concentration for our slightest movements. We live (as Thomas Rickert has wondrously written) in a milieu of ambient attention: the wiring in our walls, the digitality of our built environments, the smartness of our wearable tech all conspire to notice us every living second of our dullest days. So, perhaps somebody should tell Dr. Lanham that attention is only scarce for the humans.
But the painful wisdom in Lanham’s observation is that for all the surveillance of contemporary society, we still feel unnoticed and unknown.
Permit me a parable of disregard. I have in the last few years published a couple of books, one about socially entrepreneurial communication and the other about organizational spirituality. But it’s impossible not to be discouraged by the statistic that 4,000 books are published every day. How does one capture attention in that economy? This past summer, I wrote another manuscript, this one (appropriately enough) about communicational overwhelm. But instead of going to another publisher, I bought a short course on the book industry — a series of videos by New York literary agent Helen Zimmerman, who proved to be bluntly witty and shrewdly good-humored. Ms. Zimmerman made the constraints and possibilities of contemporary attention understandable and engagement, at least for my bike ride home as I listened to the lectures.
And then a sick feeling of anxiety settled in as I mulled over two things she said:
- Here was the first thing: finding a major publisher requires demonstrating that you can sell 10,000 books.
- And the second thing: if your previous book sold fewer than, say, 500 copies, you shouldn’t even mention it in conversations with potential publishers.
Perhaps this would be a good time to confess that my most recent royalty statement amounted to seventeen cents.
Dear Ms. Zimmerman, I want to say, how can I demonstrate that I have a large following before publishing the work that could gain that large of a following?
Enough of all the woebegoneness. What might be doable and livable in the attention economy today?
For the past few years, I’ve been conducting research and podcasting conversations with people who live and work in attentional deserts. I’ve talked to presidents and managers and directors and entrepreneurs whose tiny working communities teeter on the edge of seeming oblivion. They speak candidly about this precarity. And yet, what I’ve felt in talking with them is a kind of good-humored calm. Their affect strikes me as strangely out-of-keeping with what I can make out in their environs. Here are a few of those people:
· Jon Berbaum leads Highland Solutions in Chicago, a UX company that took an enormous financial hit in 2020. Instead of asking how they could pivot to get more clients, he asked how they might give to their clients. They created Highland Academy, a sort of free consultancy for other struggling companies. They ended up turning these free consultations into clientele.
· DeAmon Harges of the Learning Tree in Indianapolis told me at our first meeting at SOCAP that in his low-income neighborhood, people move millions of dollars of philanthropy. Whut? I’ve visited his neighborhood. It’s probably a function of white obliviousness that I can hardly imagine all those dollars circulating. But DeAmon has audio recordings of neighborly stories to prove it.
· Allen Woods of Mortar in Cincinnati helps Black and Brown entrepreneurs to incubate their start-ups and then reminds them that they are not themselves their startups. Their identity is not wrapped up in their company’s success. Mortar has helped the town of Cincinnati become a hub of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Those are just three stories. You can read more such research written up in my recently published Why Spiritual Capital Matters. (Which is, by the way, headed straight for the best-seller lists, right after you read this post and purchase just 10,000 copies.)
But for now, let me identify two takeaways from these stories of life in the strangely fruitful barrens of not-being-noticed.
First, people who have learned how to thrive in today’s uncanny attention economy have done so not by grabbing attention, but by giving it. We often talk about grabbing attention; these people bequeath it. They remind me of poets and mystics in their holy and leisurely looking and listening.
Secondly, these organizational leaders not only attend to, but they also attend on. Their attendance matters as much as their attention. Perhaps that’s just a clever turn of phrase. Let me try recasting it this way: the stories these leaders tell start not with themselves as keen and shrewd innovators, but with their places as protagonists. These leaders recognize themselves as playing a cameo in the stories of their communities and neighborhoods.
We haven’t talked about any of the great structural inequities of our time that make this attention economy not just hard but brutal and even dangerous. That’s for another blog post. But in a recent conversation, DeAmon told me that what’s helped him as a Black social innovator is not so much the practice of being resilient, but the reality of abundance. As a practicing Christian, who entrusts all of life to the care of an infinitely attentive divine life, he doesn’t see a shortage of attention today. But even if you’re a none and done when it comes to organized religion, I hope you can agree that our vocations proceed best when we seek not so much to secure attention as to share in it. We find ourselves in a world of utter responsiveness, and one more attentive than we can usually notice.
