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Before I present you with my blog thoughts for today, I want to take this opportunity to remind you that you need to be registered if you want to vote. You still have time to do that, and if you are not sure of your status (and you are from California), you can click anywhere in this notification to get some help. The November 5, 2024, election will certainly be one of the most consequential elections of any of our lifetimes, and I want to urge you to VOTE. The theme of today's blog posting is "attention." Please do pay attention, and be sure you can vote!
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The May 6, 2024, edition of The New Yorker included an article that was catagorized among its "Annals of Inquiry." The article I am speaking of, by Nathan Heller, was titled, "The Battle For Attention: How Do We Hold On To What Matters In A Distracted Age?"
The link just presented will take you to the article, but just in case paywall protection efforts prevent non-New Yorker subscribers from using that link to read the article, I am giving you another link, right here. That link will allow you to read the article in a PDF format.
To the degree that I have ever focused on the importance of "attention," at least in recent years, I have considered "attention" in the context of its ever-greater importance as a commodity. As perhaps those reading this blog posting will know, many believe that we are now living in an "attention economy."
What this means is that the giant corporations that have created an alternative "world" for us, online, are competing to grab our individual attention, which is valuable to them because our attention is routinely comandeered in the effort to sell us something. Online "influencers," in fact, are paid (and sometimes very handsomely) for their ability to get the attention of the online public.
This idea of "attention" as an economic asset is something that I have discussed with those students, in the past, who took my course at UCSC on "Privacy, Technology, And Freedom." That "economic" understanding of what "attention" is all about is the way that I have, most recently at least, thought about the topic, and this is, to be sure, an aspect of "attention" that is discussed by Heller in his article.
In his New Yorker article, though, Heller is suggesting other ways to think about "attention," and I hope that those reading this blog posting will use the links I have provided to read his article in its entirety. In many ways, "attention" is more profoundly important than we often understand.
Here is how Heller begins his article:
For years, we have heard a litany of reasons why our capacity to pay attention is disturbingly on the wane. Technology—the buzzing, blinking pageant on our screens and in our pockets—hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker and more scattered, drives concentration away. For just as long, concerns of this variety could be put aside. Television was described as a force against attention even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of focussed, worthwhile work has taken place since then.
But alarms of late have grown more urgent. Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. Clinical presentations of attention problems have climbed (a recent study of data from the medical-software company Epic found an over-all tripling of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 and 2022, with the steepest uptick among elementary-school-age children), and college students increasingly struggle to get through books, according to their teachers, many of whom confess to feeling the same way. Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of two and a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. These days, she writes, people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds (emphasis added).
Having provided this rather grim listing of how we seem to be losing the ability to "pay attention," Heller then veers from an analysis of our current situation to a kind of self-help advisory, conveyed by Heller's discussion of "The Order Of The Third Bird."
The Order of The Third Bird" is a kind of "secret" group, dedicated to the idea that our capacity for "attention" is an important aspect of what it means to be human. As Heller tells us, The Order’s name alluded to a piece of lore about three birds confronting a painting by the ancient artist Zeuxis: The first bird was frightened away, the second bird approached and tried to eat the painted fruit, and the third bird "just looked."
Heller is, basically, suggesting that we all need to exercise and develop our ability to "pay attention" - to "just look" - and he provides a rather lengthy explanation of one way to do that - one "methodology," as applied to the study of a work of art - by way of the narrative that I am copying out below:
One Sunday morning, I received a cryptic text from a performance artist named Stevie Knauss, whom I had never met. “Let’s tentatively plan on meeting in the zone indicated on this map,” the message read. A Google satellite image of the neighborhood around 155th Street and Broadway was attached, with a red arrow pointing to the Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Later, as the train that I was on travelled uptown, Knauss sent me a Find My iPhone request. I followed it across Audubon Terrace, a plaza named for the nineteenth-century artist and ornithologist, and into the Hispanic Society’s gallery. My eyes took a moment to adjust. At the place where my phone told me Knauss was stationed, a young woman in a black T-shirt sat on a bench with her back to me, staring at a painting. I sat beside her. “Stevie?” I said.
She was wearing wide-legged green Dickies, high-laced leather work boots, and dangly asymmetrical earrings. She turned to regard me, then looked back at the painting.
Knauss identified herself as an emissary affiliated with the Birds, and began to describe the way their actions worked. “The practice lasts twenty-eight minutes—four parts of seven minutes each,” she said. “The movement from one part to another is announced by a bell.”
Knauss told me that the Birds who were about to convene might not have met before. Actions were called in e-mails from alias accounts—she had heard about this one from “Wrybill Wrybillius”—with invitees’ names hidden. Any Bird could call an action; the Order was decentralized and ungoverned. Existing Birds invited new participants at their discretion, and, in this way, the Order slowly brought additional people into local chapters, known as volées. Nobody was sure how many Birds were in the world—New York City alone was home to several volées, overlapping to some degree—but there were believed to be hundreds. Actions had taken place as far afield as Korea, the Galápagos, and Kansas.
Knauss eyed some passersby. The first seven-minute phase is known as "Encounter,” she said. “I think of it as entering a party. First, you take a look around the scene.” On arriving at the action site, the Birds wander. The subject of an action is rarely, if ever, identified in advance, but usually it is the most desperate-looking work in sight. (“In a museum, it will be, like, the painting next to the bathroom or on the wall opposite the ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” Burnett told me.) The work is unnamed because the Birds are supposed to find it by paying attention. Those who don’t can follow the flock.
Next comes "Attending," announced by the first bell. “At the party, that’s when you maybe settle into conversation with someone,” Knauss explained. The Birds line up before the work, side by side, in what is known as the phalanx. For seven minutes, they silently give the work their full attention. Three things are discouraged during this period, Knauss told me. “One is what we call studium”—analysis from study. Another is interpretation, and the third is judgment. If Birds find a work offensive (or simply bad), they’re meant to put aside that response. Alyssa Loh, Burnett’s partner, who is also a Bird, told me that she understands the injunctions as a guard against the ways that people shut down their attention. “There’s a question you often hear in relation to art objects: What is it for and what do you do with it?” she said. “In the Bird practice, we mostly answer that in negatives—you can’t ‘solve’ it, can’t decide if it’s good, can’t victoriously declare that you have correctly identified its origins or that it’s an example of an eighteenth-century whatever.” You just keep attending.
The second bell heralds the start of "Negation," a phase in which Birds try to clear the object from their minds. Some lie down; some close their eyes. At the third bell, seven minutes later, the group reconvenes in the phalanx for "Realizing." Knauss said, “A good way to think of Realizing is the question: What does the work need ?” In some cases, the answer may be concrete—to be moved to a nearby wall—but it is often abstract. Perhaps a sculpture needs children climbing on it. “It might need you to hear its song,” Knauss somewhat mysteriously noted. At the final bell, the Birds disperse. “Leave the scene, find somewhere quiet to sit, and write down your experience of the four phases,” Knauss said.
A short while later, they meet up, usually in a café, for Colloquy, in which they take turns describing what they went through, distractions and all. Some Birds consider Colloquy the most important stage; it distinguishes their approach from “mindfulness” and other solo pursuits. The discussion can take on an uncanny charge. “It’s unusual to spend so much time in a small group looking at one thing, and even more unusual to talk about your impressions to the point of the ultra-thin vibrations and the associations they give rise to,” a Bird named Adam Jasper, an assistant professor of architectural history at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, told me. “With people I’ve Birded with more than a few times, I know more about how they work emotionally and mentally than I have any right to.” The writer Brad Fox described the experience as “seeing people at their best” (emphasis added).
The Heller article is lengthy. It continues on long beyond the point at which I have left you, above. Again, my advice is that it is best to read Heller's article in its entirety.
What Heller is wanting us to understand about "attention" is that it should not be considered, mainly, from the perspective of its "economic" value, or from the perspective, more generally, of its "utilitarian" value. Surely, our "attention" does have such value, but in the end, and profoundly so, our "attention" is how we may do homage to "reality," to "existence," to the "world" we have created ourselves, and even more wonderfully, to the "world" we did not create, and upon which everything we do depends, that wonderful world into which we have been so mysteriously born.
Just look!
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