This weekend past I attended our local science fiction convention, Archon. I was on a number of panels and something of a theme started to emerge. More than one, actually. A couple of times the discussion came around to our lack of attention. And I coined a phrase.
We live in a Fractured Attention Ecology.
I’m keeping that. It was off-the-cuff, but the more I think about it, I think it’s something worth exploring. I’m not equipped to do that, not clinically. I’m a writer. But I realized that we keep trying to label the chronic short attention span that seems to plague contemporary life, to fit it into a manageable file to be dealt with by the appropriate expert. Everything from ADHD to a general lack of discipline. Occasionally someone points out that we have too much information to manage, but that doesn’t always explain why we can’t simply ignore the enormous quantity and just pick a few things.
For one thing, for people who apparently are inflicted with ever-shortening attention spans, we sure consume a lot of big thick novels and tune in to extended series and even movies are getting longer. We see people scrolling through their phones for hours at a time and the hours spent going through internet connections…
But then it becomes apparent that the depth of our knowledge on average is getting shallower. Many of us know a little bit about a great many things, but not much about any given subject.
Humans adapt. We adapt very well. Over the last forty years, since cable tv appeared just to pick a starting point, we have been adapting to an ever-expanding range of choices. We have been training ourselves to try to pay attention to more and more, which means we’re absorbing less and less. The urgency to try to stay abreast seems to drive us to simply not spend much time on any one thing. Added to that, the range of things we have to pay attention to is widening.
I grant you, some of the problem is organic, but it may be self-inflicted. We adapt. We’ve adapted to a changing ecology. We haven’t done so very well. But then the ecology itself has not yet stabilized.
Fractured Attention Ecology.
Now, this may be something already being studied, so I won’t suggest I have a brand new idea about this, but no one else recognized the term, so for the time being I’m taking credit for it. It does suggest a different way to look at the problem.
More information for us to deal with.
Can you explain the context that this came up as in the panels? I am curious about the approach vector that this took to appear in the different discussions. Declining numbers of readers or attendees? People not paying attention to what is in front of them? Or lack of attention to be able to engage in ‘new’ ventures? Just curious. Thanks.
The panel was on short attention spans. We were discussing basically the apparent diminishment in a general ability (or willingness) to sit still for lengthy anything. Of course, some of the obvious counterfactuals came up, but even in the case of visual entertainment we noted an apparent unwillingness to sit through a 3-hour movie but people will happily binge-watch a 10-part miniseries. The series of course is divided up into short chuncks. It was an interesting discussion. I noted the feedback loop in the process and that the media “ecology” has responded to perceived demand.