The Eyes Have It

The Cost of Inattention in Remote Communication

Think about the last time you really tried to listen in a meeting on Teams. Your supervisor was explaining a truly engrossing process, like, how to get your hours approved on Ultipro or how to submit receipts on Box Capture.

But, oh my gosh, just look at you there, leaning forward, utterly rapt. You’re looking at the shared screen, then looking at your webcam dot—that little green light—and your lips are pursed thoughtfully. Every few seconds, you nod and smile. Your supervisor looks away from her own image for a second, glances at her webcam dot, and you look at your dot, gaze meeting gaze in a beauitful moment of cyber-communion. Your eyes snap with intelligence and intention. You are the quintessence of digital listenership.

But if you’re like me in most online committee meetings, you are so distracted by showing attention that you fail to give it.

When I was a grad student, I played a chatty cathy of a character in the Shakespearean play Much Ado about Nothing. The guy’s named was Benedick, and his antagonistic paramour was a woman named Beatrice. At one point, early in the story, she spits out one of the Bard’s snarkiest lines: “I wonder that you will be talking. Nobody marks you.”

“Nobody marks you,” here means, “You’re still on mute.”

But given the distractedness everybody feels online, maybe we should start our meetings with a motion in the chat: All in favor of saying we’re communicationally overwhelmed, please respond by saying, Aye.

The ayes have it—the motion carries. Our attempts at attention are seriously damaged.

But, hey, not to worry! Another guru churns out a book every other year with some single-worded title like Rapt, Mediated, Focus, Mastermind, or Distracted. You’ll break your budget trying to buy all these books—and it won’t help your attention deficit much either. But at least, they have a unified message: if you want to do better in work and life and on Zoom, you have to pay attention to attention itself.

Today’s gurus of attention have two basic things to say about communication overwhelm. The first is optimistic and individualistic. Thinkers like Daniel Goleman urge us to change our own habits of focus on the grounds that doing so will betterour personal relationships with people, devices, and systems of human life. We each want experiences of total immersion, and he shows how to generate hours of absorbed productivity. Hard to imagine the experience of flow while staring into your little green dot, but okay.

The second route is less hopeful and more ambitious. The world’s foremost philosopher of attention today, James William,s exemplifies this second approach when he—

Wait. I was just Googling “James Williams” and the search engine said, “Showing Results for James Williams” and then—”Search instead for William James.” Turns out William James—not Jimmy, but Bill—was the foremost definer of attention in the 19th century.

James Williams, William James. That’s not confusing. Is it just me, or does the universe feel kind of strung out sometimes?

Anyway, William James defined attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” And James Williams, who used to work at Google—until he had a crisis of conscience and stopped working at Google, but, you know, don’t be alarmed by that—says we cannot just take possession of our own minds and engineer the heck out of our trains of thought.

Why? Because the world’s most powerful companies are spending godawful amounts of money to snatch your eyeballs right out of your blessed head. Hate to break it to you, but you and your yoga mat are not going to win this one. So just stop, stop, stop trying to recalibrate your individual attentiveness. Instead, we should all team up like Avengers and recalibrate our tech platforms instead. James Williams—that’s Jimmy, not Billy—says we should redesign technological structures to serve the purposes, not of corporate profits, but of human flourishing.

And with my customary intellectual courage, I’ll assert that I agree with both of these gurus and their divergent approaches. Goleman has to be right: attention is in the eye of the individual beholder. But Williams also has to be right: attention is directed by massively powerful structures of misdirection and compulsion.

But I don’t think these gurus go far enough. Let me put my objection in the form of a question. What’s so bad about running out of attention in a Teams meeting? So, you’re frustrated that you check Twitter so much. So, you regret snarking, Beatrice-like things you’ve put in the chat. So, you feel resentful of Google for harvesting your personal data during this meeting. But, what’s the truly big deal here? Why does it finally matter that you cannot concentrate on the green dot?

Are you worried about productivity? Are you bothered by the fact that every time your boss gets the least bit droney, you turn to tweet or flick to ‘Tok?

Are you anxious about privacy? Do you fear that you’re turning into Edward Snowden, pursued not by powerful government agencies, but by the villainous Ultipro?

Here’s this week’s mode switch. I suggest that what’s fundamentally at risk when you’re a distracted digital communicator is neither your privacy nor your productivity. What’s most radically at risk when you get distracted is your capacity to behold.

I know, behold is not a word we use very often. It feels like it belongs in church, not on Teams. But behold is still a good and necessary word, a spiritually inflected term, sure, but one that evokes an absolutely indispensable kind of looking and loving. Beholding is fundamental to human wellbeing, because humans need to love and be loved. Moving from merely attending to actually beholding may be the most important thing you do with your eyes online.

Don’t get me wrong. We can do better at cultivating individual attention, and we can and should redesign the digital structures when they serve corporations better than people. But unless we learn to behold, what will all our attention be for? It should be for love, I want to say. Attention should be for affection—affection for your tasks and the tools you use to do them well; affection for your fellow workers and the vitality they carry about with them so casually onscreen; affection, even, for the poor, enormous, misbegotten world of digital platforms we’ve been making for ourselves.

Attention’s for affection, and it’s in the eye of the beholder.

Knowing that you read every single last word of this week’s newsletter with, you know, utter engrossment makes me feel affection for you. Seriously, I’m grateful. So, I feel obliged to let you know that next week the Mode/Switch will be taking a late-summer break.

See you in two weeks!

-craig