Attention Seeking

"At the moment it's as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: 'You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn't scratch so much.'" ~Johann Hari

Comical and fitting analogy lol. Several things I learned from this Guardian article by Hari:

(1) glancing at a phone notification while writing writing at your desk steals more than the 3 seconds of time it takes to look at the text and look back. It takes additional time for your brain to reconfigure between tasks - "you have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought of it" - therefore lowering your performance. It's called the "switch-cost effect" and over the course of an afternoon or workday adds up to a lot of time.

(2) if you 'fast' (abstain) from, e.g., social media, that creates a vacuum for your attention - you need to replace it with something, much like you might replace sugar drinks or alcohol with fizzy water. Hari offers flow states as a substitute and provides a nice summary. Also, see the book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

(3) the French created a legal 'right to disconnect' - i.e., to not be contacted outside of work hours by employers. This is a good idea.

I'd agree that, as the title suggests, our attention has largely been stolen, though other verbs might also be fitting. Some of us naively believe that we can restore attention and mitigate the negative effects of social media with good habits and willpower alone. Hari suggests we need large-scale policies to help us do this. Though this can be hard to achieve and might make us feel victimized or helpless, especially if we don't see a clear path to implementing that large-scale change (e.g., in non-democratic systems). I think there's a category between this sort of large-scale social action and the action of individuals that Hari overlooks. What seems reasonable - that is, achievable - is to encourage and create communities that value attention and face-to-face presence over electronically mediated forms of communication.

How might this be done? Maybe in the way that members of smaller religious communities encourage one another to uphold shared (chosen) values. Or, maybe it's just a matter of switching phones on flight mode when out on a hike or walk, or encouraging guests to leave phones at the door, kind of like you'd hang up your jacket when you enter someone's house. Maybe this sounds a bit odd or old-fashioned, not to mention difficult to maintain, but I can imagine enough like-minded friends who might be up for the social experiment.