the inattention economy

This page explores myths about the attention (or inattention') economy.

It covers -

• introduction
• dead white males and suits
• collecting clicks and eyeballs

     introduction

US writer J Peder Zane echoed Ruskin when he lamented in 2005 that

In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to master any particular discipline - e.g. computers, life insurance, medicine - has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become specialists, people who know more and more about less and less.
Add to this two other factors: the mind-set that puts work at the center of American life and the deep fear spawned by the rise of globalization and other free market approaches that have turned job security into an anachronism. In this frightening new world, students do not turn to universities for mind expansion but vocational training. In the parlance of journalism, they want news they can use.

Upon graduation, they must devote ever more energy to mastering the floods of information that might help them keep their wobbly jobs. Crunched, they have little time to learn about far-flung subjects.

The narrowcasting of our lives is writ large in our culture. Faced with a near infinite range of knowledge, the Internet slices and dices it all into highly specialized niches that provide mountainous details about the slightest molehills. It is no wonder that the last mainstream outlet of general knowledge, the daily newspaper, is suffering declining readership. When people only care about what they care about, their desire to know something more, something new, evaporates like the morning dew.

Here's where it gets really interesting. In comforting response to these exigencies, our culture gives us a pass, downplaying the importance of knowledge, culture, history and tradition. Not too long ago, students might have been embarrassed to admit they'd never heard of Jack Kerouac. Now they're permitted to say "whatever."

When was the last time you met anyone who was ashamed because they didn't know something?
It hasn't always been so. When my father, the son of Italian immigrants, was growing up in the 1930s and 40s, he aspired to be a man of learning. Forced to go to work instead of college, he read "the best books," listened to "the best music," learned which fork to use for his salad. He watched Fred Astaire puttin' on his top hat and tyin' up his white tie, and dreamed of entering that world of distinction.

That mind-set seems as dead as my beloved Dad. The notion of an aspirational culture, in which one endeavors to learn what is right, proper and important in order to make something more of himself, is past.

In fairness, the assault on high culture and tradition that has transpired since the 1960s has paid great dividends, bringing long overdue attention to marginalized voices.
Unfortunately, this new freedom has sucker punched the notion of the educated person who is esteemed not because of the size of his bank account or the extent of his fame but the depth of his knowledge. Instead of a mainstream reverence for those who produce or appreciate works that represent the summit of human achievement, we have a corporatized and commodified culture that hypes the latest trend, the next new thing.

A fundamental truth about people is that they are shaped by the world around them. In the here and now, get-the-job-done environment of modern America, the knowledge for knowledge's sake ethos that is the foundation of a liberal arts education -- and of a rich and satisfying life -- has been shoved to the margins. Curiously, in a world where everything is worth knowing, nothing is.

Scifi author Ray Bradury had more succinctly damned radio in 1951, claiming that

Radio has contributed to our 'growing lack of attention'. ... This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.

Competitor Rod Serling complained that

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

Such laments are deeply traditional. Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, is made to criticise the invention of writing -

you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Andrew Keen more snarkily proclaimed in The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday 2007) that "history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise", embracing "unwise" ideas such as "slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, Britney Spears" and the unwisdom that we call the dot-com bubble of the 1990s or the 'tulipmania' of the 17th century.

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