Stay-Home Journal 02: Cabin Fever

I’ll admit it — I’m usually quite the homebody, but having my homebodiness enforced is making it more and more unbearable. And I’m saying this as a guy with an adequate supply of food and water at home, and several portals into the world through all my digital devices.

The indiscriminate nature of a virus has led some to label it some sort of a levelling experience. That is absolutely, patently ridiculous. The virus — airborne, droplet-spread — may function perhaps as a dangerous cloud or mist. But the effects of the pandemic are more akin to a tsunami slamming into a tall building.

Me, bored and restless and trying to focus on work at home — I’m at least two-thirds of the way up that building. I will likely not get washed away; I will likely not even get wet. I will most likely be safe.

Cooped into Danger

A large part of my relative safety is simply a function of my work — digitisable, remote-able. The physical component is highly important, but not critical, thanks to an ever wider range of collaborative tools (and I’m learning about more every day too).

But there are so many who cannot ‘retreat’ into the digital in order to earn their living. At best, they are undergoing great economic stress.

And that’s not even the half of it. We like to think of home as a fortress, a safe place — that it could be otherwise is almost unthinkable. But for far too many, it is the reality. Home is not the safe hidey-hole; it’s the jaws of the tiger.

Some statistics have emerged, detailing a rise in domestic abuse cases from countries where the quarantine has been in place a little longer. This explainer from the Guardian talks about this phenomenon in the UK in a little more detail:

“We are hearing from survivors how Covid-19 is already being used by their abusive partners to further control and abuse, how Covid-19 is already impacting their ability to access support and services like accessing shelter, counseling, different things that they would typically lean on in their communities,” says Crystal Justice, the chief marketing and development officer at NDVH.

It’s a fearsome double whammy — the very thing that keeps you in an apartment with your abuser, and stops you being able to reach outward to get help. We are all locked in, but some of us are locked in with monsters.

And what can be done about this? No amount of digital initiatives will be able to substitute for getting the hell out, physically. And in fact, the easy availability and accessibility of social media all too often becomes a tool for the wrong people — whether for abusers to monitor their victims, or to normalise a situation with happy family photos for friends to see.

I don’t know if there is a design-oriented answer to this, so for now, what we can do is to help the organisations in Singapore that help survivors and victims. Off the top of my head:

• AWARE has resources relating to domestic violence, and making a donation will help.

• The Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations (SCWO) runs a shelter for survivors. You can make a donation to the related fund.

The Nature of Attention

So just today I saw this little thing about how attention is described in different languages:

I don’t think there really is a conscious motivation behind each description — languages don’t really work that way. But it does display a little bit of our social values, nonetheless.

Personally, I feel that the current way of life in developed countries fits the English definition most, and in the worst way: attention is a scarce good, paid out stingily by those who have it, grabbed at viciously by those who need it.

And it got me thinking: given the disruption of staying home and the dramatic reallocation of time for many of us, has attention gotten more or less valuable?

The enormous allocation of mental bandwidth to the grim information of the pandemic will eventually get reallocated elsewhere (which, itself, is a worrying trend, in that we might take our eyes off the monster before we’ve actually made sure it’s dead). The more lasting effects on attention, then, could come from a couple sources:

• A (perceived) loosening of constraints on our time. Being stuck at home, and not under threat, gives us a little more time to ponder things. And perhaps this will help people allocate more attention to a given project or goal, instead of flitting and multitasking.
• The dissolving of life boundaries. Our work/learning/relaxing/kids-rearing/miscellaneous spaces have pretty much become lumped together now; and it is possible they are going to leak into each other. We will become more busy, more frantic, not less.

I don’t know which of these will win out. Myself, I’m still a little paralysed by all that’s going on now, and I’m pouring my attention right down the drain of computer games. (Nope, not Final Fantasy VII, but the Early Access version of Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. I’ve only waited a decade for this bloody thing.)

But there’s one thing I have a good guess at. Whether humans make, lend, pay, or gift attention, the idea that businesses have to grasp at attention, or snatch it or force people to give it, is adversarial and foolish. In the short run, it can grow a user base.

But where the digital balance of power increasingly favours the choice of the customers to raise questions and make choices, the sustainable way forward is always to provide value — and to provide value easily.

Wilson is co-founder and content guy at Reassemble, and in these dark days, he would love to talk to you about user-centred design. Sign up here.