Beyond the Attention Economy: Exploring the Depths of Attention
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‘We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.’ Those were the words of the American biologist E O Wilson at the turn of the century. Fast-forward to the smartphone era, and it’s easy to believe that our mental lives are now more fragmentary and scattered than ever. The ‘attention economy’ is a phrase that’s often used to make sense of what’s going on in the ‘smartphone era’: it puts our attention as a limited resource at the centre of the informational ecosystem, with our various alerts and notifications locked in a constant battle to capture it. That’s a helpful narrative in a world of information overload, and one in which our devices are intentionally designed to get us hooked. Besides our own mental wellbeing, it offers a way of looking at some important social problems: from the worrying declines in measures ofempathy through to the ‘weaponisation’ of social media.
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Nevertheless, this narrative assumes a certain kind of attention. An economy, after all, deals with how to allocate resources efficiently in the service of specific objectives. Talk of the attention economy relies on the notion of attention-as-resource: our attention is to be applied in the service of some goal, which social media and other ills are bent on diverting us from. Our attention, when we fail to put it to use for our own objectives, becomes a tool to be used and exploited by others. However, conceiving of attention as a resource misses the fact that attention is not just useful. It’s more fundamental than that: attention is what joins us with the outside world. ‘Instrumentally’ attending is important, sure. But we also have the capacity to attend in a more ‘exploratory’ way: to be truly open to whatever we find before us, without any particular agenda.
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Treating attention as a resource, as implied by the attention-economy narrative, tells us only half of the overall story. An instrumental mode of attention tends to divide up whatever it’s presented with into component parts: to analyse and categorise things so that it can utilise them towards some ends. By contrast, an exploratory mode of attending adopts a more embodied awareness, one that is open to whatever makes itself present before us, in all its fullness. This mode of attending comes into playwhen we pay attention to other people, to the natural world and to works of art. None of those fare too well if we attend to them as a means to an end. It is also the exploratory mode of attention that can connect us to our deepest sense of purpose. Just note how many non-instrumental forms of attention practice lie at the heart of many spiritual traditions. The American Zen teacher David Loy characterises an unenlightened existence (samsara) as simply the state in which one’s attention becomes ‘trapped’ as it grasps from one thing to another, always looking for the next thing to latch on to. Meanwhile, Simone Weil, the French Christian mystic, saw prayer as attention ‘in its pure form’; and this, according to her, leads us to ‘the gateway to eternity…the infinite, in an instant.’
