A Crisis of Attention

Paul Doolan attends to our culture of attention demanding.

- Paul Doolan

Listen' is composed of the same letters as 'silent'. Listening to another person means falling silent while the other speaks, opening yourself up to what they have to communicate. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes this as 'a special receptivity' (The Disappearance of Rituals, 2020). Kieran Setiya argues that the path to strong relationships comes through cultivating the art of listening; forging new friendships often begins with the simple act of paying attention to the other person (Life is Hard, 2022). Too often, however, we fail to gift the other our attention or our time. I'll admit that personally, this rings too true. I am a master of some widely practiced anti-listening habits: leaping into the pauses left by my interlocutor; finishing their sentence; rehearsing my own response while acting like I'm listening; replying in a way that shifts the focus of attention onto me... I'm guilty of them all. These days, it seems like we don't have the time to pay attention.

The economist Herbert Simon characterised attention as a scarce resource: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else; a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is ... the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World, pp.40-41, 1971). So when we pay attention, what we’re paying for is information.

In this uneven exchange our attention is limited but the supply of information is limitless. So we need to be wise when we decide what we’re going to spend our limited currency on; after all, the quality of information varies enormously.