The Oncoming Attention Apocalypse
Our most precious resource isn’t time — it’s attention.
Depth vs Breadth
We’ve all been there. You’re sharing what you think is an engaging story, when all of a sudden, the eyes of the person across from you start to wander. Maybe their gaze shifts to something more exciting behind you. Maybe they‘re looking to the side, suddenly caught in a reverie. Or maybe… sin of all sins, their attention drifts downward — to their smartphone.
What do you do?
Keep telling your story? Pause? Give a double cough? A thwack upside the head? (Don’t do that.) It’s a tough situation, and one that after repeat experiences may sour work relations or even friendships. We all want to believe that we can hold someone’s focus, but in today’s age of endless distraction and the battle to never be bored, this can be a challenge.
And guess what? It’s about to get worse. I’m not talking about a simple increase in the quantity of demands on our attention. No, my concern lies with our future ability to even register whether or not you have someone’s attention.
What do I mean by that? Let’s start by giving it a pithy and foreboding mnemonic: the power of (whispers 🤫) *secret focus.*
Today, if you’re speaking to someone, you can generally tell if you have their attention; if they’re looking at their phone, you don’t have it. But the information on that little black mirror is beginning to migrate from a single surface held in-hand to sights and sounds splashed on top of the entire world around us. And no one but the viewer will know what they’re looking at.
When this digital overlay becomes ubiquitous, private, and personalized, someone could appear to be giving you all the correct social cues for an engaged conversation while their attention is actually fragmented across any number of focal points. You just won’t know.
😲*secret focus!*😎
Truth in Advertising
Everyone continues to debate the terminology, but whether you call it augmented reality, spatial computing, or the metaverse, one thing is clear: it’s happening. My generation’s grandchildren are going to find it adorably quaint that we used to stare at a tiny box to read reviews of the restaurant that was directly in front of us. They’re going to see everything they could possibly want to know about that restaurant right on top of it as a digital overlay.
To the uninitiated: This isn’t a bold new prediction. The notion of contextual layers of information on top of our world has been bandied about in science fiction for decades, often presented as a clear advancement of civilization. I’m a perpetual techno-apologist, nearly always finding my distrust of the new vastly outweighed by my excitement for all the new possibilities it offers.
In 2010, my architecture thesis “Scopic Operations in Military Theatre” utilized augmented reality as a method for engaging with more theatre content from more perspectives at once than one would otherwise be able to experience. I was utterly thrilled by the ‘more more more’ nature of AR.
Later that year, I saw the negative potential of the technology in a short film by Keiichi Matsuda, which he expanded upon in the excellent “Hyperreality.” Matsuda demonstrates how a bombardment of information, advertisements, and digital interactivities overlaying the real world can lead to a shallower, rather than richer, engagement with it. Despite the grand personalization the protagonist experiences, she feels lost… and lonely. Though she is surrounded by living people, they never find occasion to interact.
Tech You Don’t Turn Off
Today we are in the early embrace of ‘wearable’ technologies. They’re always on, and require less and less effort to utilize. An Apple Watch is always attached to your wrist. Bose AR can be worn as readily as any pair of sunglasses. The Kurv is an input device worn on your hands that you could put on in the morning and wear throughout most of your daily activities. This technology isn’t something you take out of your pocket, enter a passcode, then tap through five more menus to complete a task with; it’s on a path of reducing friction further and further until we no longer even need to think about it. Keeping it active will require no action. The real thinking (and friction and action) will happen when you want to turn it off.
This continuous passive engagement provides a different expectation than something like headphones, which most people wear only when actively using them. If someone is wearing headphones while speaking to you, you may assume they have some light music playing in the background — probably not, say, an audiobook. But if someone is walking around with Bose AR or some future version of Magic Leap or Hololens that’s wearable all of the time, they will likely have an endless stream of context-sensitive data streaming to them, and will need to actively disable (or remove) those devices to have a proper one-on-one with you.
The opportunity to engage in many activities simultaneously across many planes of reality will be so tempting, so ever-present, that it will take more effort to stop doing it than just letting it happen.
Lying Through Digital Teeth
We’ve gone from spellcheck to autofilling words to now even autofilling sentences. We have Snapchat filters that change the appearance of our face in realtime, AI voice assistants that can pass the Turing Test, machine learning face-swaps (deepfakes), and social VR worlds that allow you to puppeteer your expression. It’s not unreasonable to think we’re inbound for a world where these technologies coalesce into the ultimate simulators of you behaving ‘correctly’ while in truth you could be doing just about anything. One example: You could be chatting with someone, your expression seemingly engaged and responsive, while in reality your attention is on a video game. Or, to use another example drawn from the short film “Sight,” your attention may be on a person, but you have an app running that tells you exactly how to behave in order to achieve certain results.
Some would say they would never give another human being anything less than their undivided attention. Others would say they would, but they’re a great multitasker, so it’s okay. They could totally carry on a conversation and catch up on Narcos at the same time!
Here’s a true statement: humans can multitask, but they can’t multi-concentrate. Tasks that you’ve built into your muscle memory (eating, biking, knitting) can be completed while you’re focused on something not in you muscle memory (talking, reading, writing). Some would say they can focus-switch fast enough that the semantics of what to call it are moot, but that’s a discussion for another article… or maybe just Twitter. My point is the opportunity to engage in many activities simultaneously across many planes of reality will be so tempting, so ever-present, that it will take more effort to stop doing it than just letting it continue happening.
*Secret focus. Secret focus. Secret focus…*
And yes, while I’m writing this, I’m also watching Netflix, keeping half an eye on one my kids (don’t worry, he’s just playing with trucks), and also “productively procrastinating” by writing a tutorial and reviewing mocap footage from a shoot last week. These all may be happening somewhat simultaneously, but I’m only truly focused on one at a time. And yes, I’m cognizant of the fact that I’d probably be making much more progress on this if it was the only thing in front of me.
I’m well-aware that I’m missing some important dialogue on my show. I keep forgetting which mocap take I already watched. Sometimes my son asks me a question and my response comes out reflexively, not as considered as it should be. I accept that my attention is divided, but I no longer pretend that it’s not. I used to think I had a superpower — I’ve been ‘multitasking’ as long as I can remember, but always in a way that requires a lot of set-up and coordination. It was never in a way that could effortlessly intrude on our interpersonal relationships. The wearable future, with its omnipresent nature, has that power.
The Future All Around Us
Many smart people have been quoted saying something along the lines of “time is our most precious commodity.” And yet, there is much we can do with time simultaneously, layering activity upon activity upon activity.
I’d like to re-frame that mindset: time is a valuable commodity, but even more valuable is our focus, which, like time, is finite. We should choose wisely on what to spend it. With that in mind, I’d like to propose the following:
Guidelines for Courtesy in a World of Secret Focus
1. When speaking to another human being, give them as much attention as you can spare. Turn off all unnecessary digital devices. If you‘re taking notes, fine, leave Google Docs open. Don’t leave a Twitch stream playing.
2. Give yourself a schedule that gives attention to anything worth savoring, then layer everything else. I always eat with my wife and kids without any electronics. I always read before bed. I always watch Billions while working in Unreal Engine. Our brains like patterns, and it’s easier to follow a schedule you’ve pushed into muscle memory than a constantly improvised one.
3. Device manufacturers: Make it easy to disable your device. And, similarly to how Magic Leap has a blinking red light when you’re recording, have an indicator to make clear to spectators if the device is active or not.
Our devices will continue to reduce our cognitive load and give us progressively more raw data that is contextual and of interest to us, but that doesn’t mean we can process it any faster. Remember that, and choose your attention wisely.
At least… until you become a cyborg with an upgraded brain OS.
