Attention Agreements

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) once said he wanted to develop a lifestyle that didn’t require his presence. Enter the means to do just that. The smartphone era heralds the uncoupling of physical presence from the virtual universe’s offering of perpetual on-line attention.

You might witness the phenomenon of the one on a phone walking and talking next to you, the one with that tell-tale faraway look and the hands gesticulating as if the body were from the village of the damned – physically there but inhabiting an elsewhere life.

We’d addressed before the smartphone’s capacity to hijack one’s attention by means of social media, essentially an attention-extraction vehicle (MM 11/30/20) as chronicled in the documentary The Social Dilemma. Resistance is futile. Especially vulnerable to these attention hijacking techniques are the youth with their still-developing neocortex. It brings to mind Charles Baudelaire’s take that the devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.

But now, whether it’s labeled as an addiction or habituation, we have essentially become hostage to this virtual universe at the same time that attention itself has become the ultimate and increasingly scarce resource (from MM 3/9/26 Mattering). Consider the cited example of that eight-year-old who tells his dad, “Yeah, you’re always on your phone, and it makes me feel like you don’t want to talk to me,” as he names his own truth more out of resignation than resentment.

The boy grows up in a world where such seemingly innocuous micro-aggressions become normalized. He himself may fall prey to the false comfort of being “somewhere else.” Perhaps he will later enter into a relationship with a similarly-afflicted partner. Welcome to the specter of a phone-based adulthood and what it is doing to love and sex (click: Your Marriage Has a Third).

The tough news is that many people now live in an “open tab” state of continuous partial attention with the smartphone offering an always-available exit from relationship friction even as the key to meaningful connection is the confidence that one’s bid for connection will be received. Serial micro-withdrawal equates to attention infidelity.

The good news is that the identification of the problem, if there is one, is half the solution. The answer may lie in something as simple as a couple entering into an attention agreement for rules of engagement that sees each partner first as a human rather than as a default to a (human)node.

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