The Attention Wave
Brutal wars & dance performances
During the first week of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, I was totally in it. Telegram channels, Air Force maps, live updates, translating Russian/Ukrainian tweets, and downloading leaked documents to my laptop.
My weird process
What was weird to me, was my fading out process that started after a few days. While the videos from Ukraine were still fucking insane, my mind slowly began to push me away from being in that high-intensity environment in order to get back to my normal daily life. On the 5th day of the invasion, I stopped my telegram notifications, on the 8th I unfollowed Russian-speaking accounts, and so on. I switched from spending 40% of my day on reading tweets and analyzing the invasion, to spending only 2–3% maintaining the minimum attention level that would allow me to stay up with “big updates”. This drop in the attention curve happened all around me, leaving the war geeks and the folks with actual relations alone in the field.
How is it possible? Did we lose our empathy?
Ukraine is still extremely bleeding. This is an insane event that is compared to WW2, a huge massacre, and first-line fascism. Moreover, if it gets out of hand, it has the potential to affect the whole world (NATO, Nuclear, Resources, China, etc.) and already pushes countries to create massive changes to deal with energy concerns. Yet, within a few weeks, the public conversation shifted back to dealing with the usual mess (with each government giving it less/more coverage based on how affected they are by the situation).
The apathetic mechanism
Biological mechanisms cause us to drop interest after a certain point, explaining why we don’t stay engaged. Once the mechanism kicks in, we become highly resistant to the events, no matter how horrible they are or how many Ukrainians are dying. (Where I live (Israel) people are being stabbed and killed so many times, and we honestly don’t give a shit anymore, It’s too exhausting (some will say that we even became stronger because of it. (Book reference)).
The attention wave
Rapid growth — Sharp drop — Slow fade out.
Why would our bodies trigger such behavior?
The apathetic mechanism’s main use is to focus on what matters to our survival. Usually, we have 2 modes of being:
- Running Mode (autopilot): where we simply live our life based on our existing rules.
- Update Mode: where we update our core selves.
The “Running” mode consumes much fewer processing units, so it frees our minds to get food and find love, while “running”, we are simply obeying our existing algorithms. The “update” mode is an energy-consuming process where we delete ideas from our core code and replace them with new ones. It’s similar to playing football versus changing the rules of football. Changing the rules requires creativity and imagination. Playing is a simple library of commands that repeat themselves in a structured order. Updating our core beliefs means redesigning how/why we do things. This is also why we hate changes.
Drop it like it’s hot
When a radical event occurs and requires a reevaluation we have limited time and energy (personal mental capacity/intensity of the event) to get the data and process it. The bigger the event (subjectively), the more impact it has on our attention. The attention drop is basically our minds saying, I have seen enough. We can go back to spreading our genes.
Attention engineering
Attention engineering is the art of understanding and using attention waves. We’ve always tried to master it. We use attention waves to keep our audience hooked, launch products/campaigns when the market is ready, kill the bad guy at the right time in a movie, analyze marketing funnels for engageable sweet spots, djing a party, start a company at the right time, and kiss our girlfriend at the peak of our evening. It’s our way to build stories and communicate ideas. Those who master it are considered magicians and are able to move mountains.
Zelensky
President Zelensky did well when he pushed a global media strategy from a very early stage of the invasion. By creating viral videos, at the right time, he was able to engage the entire world.
Attention ≠ Content
The content of a situation isn’t necessarily correlated with how engaged we are (example). We are far more gut-oriented creatures than we think we are. For example, whenever something becomes repetitive, our attention drops no matter how “interesting” the content is (think of how we get used to waterfall sounds or watch this “Monotone speech”). We need waves to be dynamic. What’s amazing is that it doesn’t matter at all how intense the level is. Once you're hooked, if it stays static, we will adapt (lose interest). The art of attention engineering is to create waves that travel between different levels of intensity in a way that “makes sense” and keeps the story alive.
Fixed timeline attention
I saw many dance performances as a dancer. Dance pieces usually have a fixed timeline. Great choreographers are those who are able to design & leverage the attention wave to bring their vision to life. Two interesting examples of different attention engineering approaches are in the performances “Grand Finale” by Hofesh Shechter, and “Love Chapter 2” by Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar. I hope one day I’ll have a brain lab for myself, to map these findings with chemical reactions, and see that in real-time.
This is an oversimplification, I highly recommend watching the shows, or any show, while being aware of the attention wave decisions the choreographer/musician/storyteller took. For tech lads, think of it as a product that 100% of it, is UX engineering.
Grand Finale
When watching “Grand Finale” by Hofesh, I felt that the energy timeline was carefully and smartly designed. A constant energy increase, side by side with small echo drops for digesting every once in a while (with a 15-minute break to refuel the audience engine). After the break, the volume keeps climbing to the heroic & thrilling finale frames, beautifully closing the loop.
Love chapter 2
“Love Chapter 2” takes a different approach. Starting with very low intensity and gradually moving upwards through gradual steps increase. The step function is incredibly effective at bringing you up to speed smoothly. Once the dancers get to what feels like the energy ceiling, they keep pushing, breaking the ceiling through the “UP & OUT” thrilling end.
When I was young I fell in love with magic tricks, great magicians are top-level attention engineers.
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Top tier attention engineer: Jenny Hoyos
Just found out that Bloomberg Opinion posted an article today (04/12) by John Authers, covering the effects of the attention wave on the market and politics. They also attached a Google Trends view of the word “Ukraine”. The graph is even sharper than I thought.
