The Economics of Attention

A grade 12 student told me how she was really looking forward to the simplicity of ‘only’ having exams - that is, she was looking forward to the time when all the courseworks and IAs, orals and presentation were done. It wasn’t so much that she felt these aren’t valuable or fun or that she wanted to narrow towards exams, but there was just so much to keep track of, and to keep in mind that she longed for simplicity and reduction of cognitive load.  Put another way, she simply wanted less stuff to pay attention to.

This commonplace observation about the pressure on our attention leads us to interesting (and perhaps somewhat disturbing) places.  It came to mind when I was relaxing on Saturday morning, but also wondering if I should upgrade to the latest iOS, process the message from the tax authorities, sort out a follow up to recent dental treatment, collect together some receipts for a claim, book a flight home for my daughter, follow up on that odd unexplained item on my bank statement, write a list of Xmas presents for the family, hang that picture in my son’s bedroom, cross-check mortgage payments and so on and so on. And that’s before I even think about the various things at work - of which there are many - or even glance at various social media feeds.

'Attention' as a concept is now widely recognised as
a critical concept in economics, psychology and philosophy 

Now it’s not that I actually mind any of those tasks. In fact, I almost half enjoy the box-ticking element of mundane household tasks - sometimes, the more mindless, the better. But I realised that what they do is provide distraction; they take my attention away from actually relaxing on a Saturday morning. By occupying mental space, even peripherally, they prevent me from relaxing and just being in the moment; and if I am not careful, then even my morning run just turns an sweaty internal rehearsal of the tasks ahead; and if I pick up a book, my reading is superficial and rushed.

Philosopher Michael Crawfold claims that the difficulty here is a deeper one than just the often-lamented ‘hassle of modern life’; he argues that living like this means that real life cannot get a grip on us. The little tasks claim attention, and if one gives it to them for long enough, and in a sustained manner, it’s not just that they claim time in our lives: Crawford argues that they actually create a void at the centre. I think what he’s getting at is that if we cannot affirm the central things we care about, because we have forgotten them amidst the trivia, then we have no basis from which to resist the colonisation of our life with whatever is right in front of us - likely the minutiae of daily life, or worse, the personalised feeds of advertisers eager to monetise our attention.

In small quantities, some of this trivia may be necessary. But if it becomes a constant diet, then we’ll be in danger of neglecting the more important things that actually mean something. Like it or not, we are living in an ‘attention economy’ - which is to say that it’s our attention which is the scarce resource, and which we need to save and invest carefully. That is why the skills of self-management, resilience and self-awareness are in increasingly high demand; they all are expressions of our capacity to control our attention and not let it be captured by others.  In our thinking about the sort of education that’s fit for the 21st Century, these capacities need to be playing a central role.

Reference

Lanhan, R. (2007) The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. University of Chicago Press.