Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
José Ortega y Gasset 1883 – 1955
What we do with our attention determines who we are. It is a shocking truth to hear as we scroll through our news and social media feeds. Perhaps that truth was hard to see in the past, but our digital world is making it now abundantly clear. Can we expect to spend hours each day on news feeds or social media posts and not be changed? Simply raising the question answers it. We know huge changes are taking place within us, and in our families, communities and nations. Yet it is difficult to articulate what they are, let alone control where they are taking us.
We are now said to be in an attention economy. The term was first used in 1971 but its importance has increased almost exponentially since then. Each of us has a very limited amount of attention, and an increasing number of influencers, advertisers, governments and institutions are competing for it. Those that compete for our attention are not benevolent, and the techniques they use are powerful and not benign. They know that by default we prefer enjoyment to hard truth and by feeding us the stories we want to read, they can make us the people they want us to become.
We find our attention directed to trivialities such as other people’s lives, sensational events, or anything else we are consciously or even unconsciously interested in. We have an innate curiosity about people and events. Joseph Conrad once said that “Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys,” and our culture encourages us to pursue enjoyment wherever it can be found. Yet those were not activities that traditionally were supported by the faith. For most of history people of faith were admonished to say no to idle curiosity and gossip. But idle curiosity and gossip are the mainstays of our news and social media feeds.
There are many forms of attention, and most of us can sense the difference between scrolling through the tragedies and sensational events on our screens and paying serious attention to the suffering of the world. Serious attention draws us to God and the transcendent, while superficial attention and idle curiosity are only distractions. St. Augustine called curiosity a disease and encouraged people of faith to avoid it. Perhaps that is all we can do now. We will probably never be able to fully resist the temptations of our screens, but at least we need to be aware of their dangers. We need to make the effort to spend some time in serious attention to the world around us, to the suffering around us, and to our innate longing for God and the good.
