Attention: My Word of the Year

Just pay it.

The Attention Economy is the only show in town. We have a world that is spiralling into a vortex of ADD, autism, Alzheimer’s, and those are just the maladies we think we can diagnose. Now there’s screen addiction and parents cannot even prise the devices from their toddlers’ cold, dead hands. People are finally paying attention to the fact that we cannot pay attention any more; and that this is a special crisis among our young people.

Back in 2004, I addressed a panel from the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa. I told them about the evidence of brain damage and ADD from cellphones. I told them I fought for years to stop teachers smoking in the staffroom, I was very against tobacco, but that I would far rather see a 14-year-old smoking a cigarette than putting a phone against their heads.

I said to them: if you are a teacher, you will know how important attention is, in the classroom. It’s your single most vital asset. If you’ve got their attention, you can do anything. If you haven’t, you can do nothing.

Just one child who cannot sit still and pay attention can destroy a lesson. Now, despite all the drugs, we have entire classrooms where no one can sit still and pay attention.

I said to this panel: right now, all I’m trying to do is hold your attention.

I did a master’s degree in education a long time ago, 1987. It was on the language of the science classroom, and I recorded hundreds of hours of classroom discourse and spent thousands of hours listening to it and transcribing it, word for word.

In the process, I found that there was no proper instrument in the entire education research literature for measuring “attention” in the classroom, so I set about developing, testing, and validating my own. To my knowledge, my method is still unique in the field. I’m keeping it under wraps for now, because I do think the Attention Economy is finally gaining the attention it deserves, and I may have an ace up my sleeve in this game.

But for now, and I very seldom play these games, I do offer “Attention” as the word of the year for 2018. Achtung!

There’s a very nice song in capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, one of my favourites. It’s called É só prestar atenção: All you’ve got to do is pay attention. This is a Brazilian struggle, capoeira, my brother. All you’ve got to do is pay attention.