The Attentional Commons
Walking down the street from my office to the bus station, I am bathed in a bright red neon glow. The whole street is. Looking at me from above is probably the largest single screen in Israel, outside of cinema theaters. Its goal — advertising. Its customers — literally everyone on the street at the moment.
You can’t escape it; its pull is too strong. It is attached to the side of a large mall. Who has decided it should be there? Who has Ok’d the brightness with which it shines, night and day? Who deemed it “perfectly fine” to make such a claim on all of our attention with the moving, dancing, happy images it displays? I didn’t.
The resource that is attention
The concept of the attentional commons was championed by Matthew Crawford, author of The World Beyond Your Head. If air and water are deemed “common” resources, so is our attention, Crawford suggests. A person’s attention is a valuable and finite resource, and so, any claim to it must be made with care. A person, a company, or any other entity should not be able to unilaterally decide to grab my attention, without a really good reason for it (making money off of me not being such a reason).
“What if we saw attention in the same way that we saw air or water, as a valuable resource that we hold in common?” Crawford asks. “Perhaps, if we could envision an ‘attentional commons,’ then we could figure out how to protect it.”
In a very real sense, what I pay attention to defines who I am. Our claims of consciousness pretty much start and stop at the precious few items we hold in our attention at any given moment. Giving our valuable attention to something should be a conscious decision, made after weighing the pros and cons. A larger premium should be placed on others’ ability to address me. And I don’t mean here the occasional senior citizen asking for directions. Rather, I’m talking about the nameless corporations that have peppered the streets — first with posters, now with screens.
As Homo sapiens, we have evolved to notice minute changes in the environment, whether auditory or visual. Millions of years of evading predators left us in a perfect position to be exploited by large screens. Sure, I have some ability to evade sounds with earbuds or noise-cancelling headphones. But there’s not much I can do when it comes to avoiding the visual advertisements, if I want to walk down the street safely.
There’s another effect of the intrusion on our attentional commons: the flattening of the human experience. If we’re all sharing the same involuntary response to a moving, shining advertisement, then by definition we aren’t being fully present with each other. When going to a restaurant now, I make an effort to seek the place around the table that’s not facing any screens, to avoid that involuntary response to pretty pictures. But this responsibility shouldn’t be mine alone. It’s just as reasonable to expect the owner of the place to attempt to facilitate active human interaction, rather than passive group consumption.
The concentric circles of the commons
Our relationship with the common resource air, for example, can be thought of as several concentric circles. In thinking about the nature of the attentional commons, it can be helpful to trace those circles:
- The innermost circle governs our interactions with people in our immediate vicinity.
- The middle circle operates on the communal level.
- The outermost circle covers all of society, with its laws and social norms.
In the case of air, the first circle is where we form the expectations that people would have tolerable breath, won’t blow their cigarette smoke into our faces, and would avoid spreading unpleasant smells. In the case of attention, this is where we’d push back against our interlocutors constantly glancing at their phones during a conversation, or against the expectation that we’ll always be available online.
The next, communal circle is where we decide, as a community, that it’s frowned upon to smoke in a public space, even if not explicitly forbidden by the law. Or, we decide we won’t tolerate a car spewing black smoke, even if it’s technically legal. In the same way, we might discourage people from listening to music through their speakers in a public place. Or, we might discourage them from filming a whole concert on their phone. This circle is also where we would manage the expectations of availability and attentional freedom in our places of work and rest.
Finally, the largest circle is where laws are passed, and where decisions that affect the whole of society are made. This is where we ban cigarettes in schools and airports, limit the amount of CO2 that factories are allowed to pump into the air, and give subsidies to green companies. We do this for the specific purpose of keeping our air clean. This is where we could decide to ban advertisements on the freeway or in schools. Or where tech platforms like Instagram or Facebook could be investigated for their part in the growing depression epidemic. Perhaps there’s also room for regulations (formal or informal) to limit the addictive properties of the technologies we use.
Nobody has decided on it, but we’re all paying for it
This is not just a theoretical framework. The practical implications of the attentional commons are real and dire. These costs are just as real as the costs of pumping toxic gases into our airways, or dumping waste products into our water supply. Crawford writes that “in the main currents of psychological research, attention is treated as a resource — a person has only so much of it. Yet it does not occur to us to make a claim for our attentional resources on our own behalf. Nor do we yet have a political economy corresponding to this resource, one that would take into account the peculiar violations of the modern cognitive environment.”
We need to wake up to the fact that right now, none of the decisions above are handled in a democratic manner. They’re also made without a solid philosophical foundation.
To quote Crawford:
The ever more complete penetration of public spaces by attention-getting technologies exploits the orienting response in a way that preempts sociability, directing us away from one another and toward a manufactured reality, the content of which is determined from afar by private parties that have a material interest in doing so. There is no conspiracy here, it’s just the way things go. […] Who made the decision to pimp out the security trays [at the airport] with [advertisements]? The answer, of course, is that Nobody decided on behalf of the public. Someone made a suggestion, and Nobody responded in the only way that seemed reasonable: here is an “inefficient” use of space that could instead be used to “inform” the public of “opportunities.”
We need clean air and unpolluted water to have a healthy body, and we need silence (auditory, visual and even spatial) to have a healthy mind. Crawford proposes that the very valuable thing which we take for granted is “the condition of not being addressed.” It is something that we give up willingly when we’re in the company of people of our choosing. But being involuntarily addressed by artificial means (the pop-up ads, the models on the big screen at the mall, the pimped-up stereo blaring music from a sports car) is an entirely different thing.
A return to Silence
The benefits of silence are difficult to quantify. Subjectively, though, anyone who has experienced both states — working in a noisy, distracting environment, and in a silent, calm one—can intuitively feel the difference. We know that a lack of concentration (and thus attention, creativity and innovation) is the price we pay for being in a “noisy” environment. So, we turn to the usual solution when the commons are under attack. We host private parties, and we pay money to escape the noise of ads. Indeed, we’ve turned silence into a luxury good (think of airport lounges, VIP tickets and soundproof private booths). Everyone pays the “attention merchants” with attention (to borrow a phrase from Tim Wu) — and if you don’t want to, you’ll have to pay with hard cash.
Crawford suggests that “we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed,” because “[attention] is the thing that is most one’s own: in the normal course of things, we choose what to pay attention to, and in a very real sense this determines what is real for us; what is actually present to our consciousness”, and so “[appropriations] of our attention are then an especially intimate matter.” He sums up the idea of the attentional commons [emphasis mine]:
The idea of a commons is suitable in discussing attention because, first, the penetration of our consciousness by interested parties proceeds very often by the appropriation of attention in public spaces, and second, because we rightly owe to one another a certain level of attentiveness and ethical care.
