Between Distraction and Meaning

I allowed myself to venture out a little further than usual on my proverbial branch for my talk at Beit-Berl’s New Media colloquium last week. The wonderfully bright and entertaining Emily Lutzker organized the evening around the subject of Continuous Partial Attention (CPA).

At first, I felt that I really did not have much to contribute to this subject. But as I started thinking about it – I considered how different it is to interact with people who obviously have the CPA switch turned ON, and how commonplace attention problems really, really are. Suddenly, everyone I spoke to shared personal anecdotes about their own ADD diagnosis or their difficulties with attention, or lack thereof. Both their own, and people they work with.

Obviously, something is going on.

As Emily so succinctly put it – I found myself looking to ‘diagnose’ the culture of distraction. What is the root cause of this restlessness? With such a diagnostic approach to the subject, it’s not surprising that I was led back to my psychological perspective, and in particular, my interest in trauma. The following speech notes is the result.

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Between Distraction and Meaning –
What is the meaning of attention in fragmented virtualities?

“Become one with the interface”.
Neo, Matrix Reloaded

Linda Stone explains CPA as an urge to ‘feel alive through being connected’. The individual scans his environment in a constant state of ‘ON’, open and looking for connections. In other words, on a basic level, this is a healthy urge, though perhaps one that is pushed to an extreme by the functionality and availability of social media devices. Stone, of course, acknowledges the importance to balance the tendency of constantly being only partially attentive to any given context by providing stronger and more focused attention both in interpersonal situations and in larger contexts such as work places.

I’d like to try to look at the tension between the anxious scanning of the interpersonal and technological environment and the search for a sense of connection in a larger cultural and philosophical perspective.

One of the places this is seen is in a new field of ‘Attention Economy’, a proposed new form of economy emerging, based on the currency of attention. Michael Goldhaber, in attempting to elucidate some of the cultural trends that have contributed to this new form of currency, notes a connection between individuals today who are dealing with existential questions of meaning while also being immersed in social connections. The fundamentally human need for attention from other humans serves as a drive to quench the thirst for meaning through creating, performing, selling and generating attention.

Where fragmentation of attention is a dynamic that works from “the inside out”, a complementary process of multi-faceted and fragmenting identity is taking place from the “outside-in”. Identity is central to issues of social interaction as well as to more existential issues such as the way in which one finds or constructs a meaningful life for one’s self. Taking up the concept of ‘attention’ as a personal resource that directs the self, we can see that the sense of identity is closely related to the emergence of self through being and action.

In socially mediated and multi-faceted environments (social networks, interpersonal communication platforms, multi-player games, and so forth), questions of how to present one’s self are immediate, demanding and difficult to navigate. Every interaction is accompanied by numerous new questions that have no standard or accepted answers. These questions are particularly difficult in environments that have ‘collapsed social/situational contexts’ [1] with blurred boundaries between different personal circles. Which persona or aspect of my self should be presented as the most dominant? How to manage which information to share, and how to present it? How can I maintain contacts with different circles of acquaintances when each one is related to a different facet of your life? Questions such as these highlight the ‘outside-in’ dynamic of the interpersonal aspect of attention.

The inside-out dynamic provides an additional perspective with which to understand this phenomenon. Postmodernism has provided the grounding and the tools with which an almost complete deconstruction of the ‘self’ was achieved. The ’subject’ has been pronounced dead – whether in the form of the author, the subject, the ego, or self-identity. More generally,  the very concept of one, stable construct of ‘Self’ is no longer viable. However, as Calvin Schrag has demonstrated, these questions may simply have changed their formulation rather than passing completely from the world. Specifically, he notes that the question of self has been re-defined, from ‘What is the self’, to ‘Who is the self’. The ‘story of the self after post-modernism’ is a project that seeks to understand who the self is in each of the myriad contexts it speaks, acts and interacts.

Robert J. Lifton’s theory of Symbolic Immortality is relevant here. His major work, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life [2] presents a beautifully coherent and profound theory addressing a the spectrum of existential psychology. For the purpose of this essay, I’ll limit discussion of his theory to the concept of psychological symbolism. Lifton proposes that all of human action is represented and mediated via a constant stream of symbolic images. He elaborates this on a basis of biological theory that demonstrates that organisms first represent their actions in some form of pre-planned, abstract manner before physically acting them out .

If we apply this concept in the phenomenological context of embodied being, we can clearly see how the attentional resource of any particular individual is integrally related to his particular embodied being in a given space at a given time. What “I want right now” is a function of “who I am” and “where I want to go”.

P.J. Bracken raises a connection between the rising phenomenon of trauma and PTSD, and places it in a wider socio-cultural context, suggesting that it is essentially linked to post-modernity as it is embodied in our culture’s institutes…In particular, he raises an important question that has far-reaching ramifications: he challenges the widely held position that PTSD has always existed, but has only recently become recognized, defined and named as a result of growing support from wider social and political contexts.

If trauma in fact has a history, this has important implications on the actual ontological essence of the self. This points to the possibility of an evolutionary development of the ‘self’ – where the post-modern formations of ‘self’ are not more true than any of the previous concepts of self. Instead, these re-constructions of the self as a ‘Who’ engaged in multi-faceted forms of discourse, action and community would seem to be part of a larger historical pattern witnessed in forms of culture, society, politics and technology.

Specifically, we can point to a co-evolution between representational technologies and forms of the self. In today’s world of digital and social media, this issue is particularly complex, considering the ways in which the corporate, political and mass media/ entertainment spheres are involved in creating and manipulating the representational technologies offered to individuals.

The difficulties and challenges of managing online identity are being fruitfully explored, and these are important and even urgent issues. However, I would like to also draw focus to the form of creation and manipulation of multi-faceted identity in ways that are closer to home. In the interactions between older and younger generations, teachers and students, parents and children, employers and employees.

Carlos Shtrenger, a psychoanalyst and writer on the subject of the changing concepts of individuality, self and creativity in the information age suggests that there are unique challenges facing the X- and Y- generations (and beyond). Specifically, he notes that the phenomenon of the digital communication technologies has played a complementary role in the changes from the previous generations to this one. Where the 50-60’s generations were wholly engaged in a whole-out rebellion against the traditional values, their children have nothing left to really rebel against. Without cause for rebellion, these generations are in fact disconnected from their parents’ generation. There are few links and fewer common languages.

He demonstrates how the symbolic order of societal authority is being replaced by a horizontal cultural context wherein an individual’s peers and colleagues serve as the important context for his developing individual. This supports a kind of Deleuzian rhizomatic structure of the self wherein what is important are the horizontal connections between the one unit and the other units. However, this also brings up new existential challenges – with the practically endless possibilities for creating and designing one’s self identity, the self experiences a great deal of angst in situating itself in a place that can be experienced as ‘authentic’ and grounded.

Specifically, the much younger generations today have far less difficulty in navigating fluid social situations. They are becoming proficient communicators, collaborators and socializers and networkers. Utilizing the digital forms of representation, they are able to keep engaged in any form and scope of social mesh they desire. The new forms of challenges resulting from these increasingly represented interrelationships are relevant to all generations and to increasingly more and more cultural institutions.

I’d like to suggest that the main challenge thrown up by the hyper-sociality of the younger generations for the older generations – be they parents, educators, employers or social and cultural leaders – are in understanding and clearly defining the ways in which underlying goals, values and ideologies translate into collective spaces and transactions.

In other words, we need to learn and precisely understand the relationship between intransient values and material spaces, as embodied for example in computer games, information systems, social media as well as cultural organizations and spaces. We must continue to develop our inter-generational communicative abilities – to bridge common languages fueled by values and by vision. It is not enough to learn the trends of youth and how to ‘talk to them in their language’, we must also have something to say. However this message needs to be translated into architectural, generative forms that open a multi-faceted space for a wide variety of individual expression to take place.

This is suggestive of the urgent need to understand precisely how digital interfaces structure and function in the socio-cultural as semiotic spaces, as borders with meaning. We need to develop new tools – conceptual and technological – to enable us to perceive as fully as possible the complex dialectic between the technological borders and the social context. We need to insistently ask whether technology can be naïve. And what happens when the ‘message of the medium’ is neglected by the economic and cultural bodies responsible for designing and delivering the technology, who appeal instead to a superficial model of ‘listening to their audience’ by appealing to measures of popularity and ratings.

The desire for connectivity is not only human, it is the dialectic shadow of the post-traumatic, post-modern, fragmented situation. It is going to become more and more urgently sought after by younger generations. Will this lead to greater addiction to MMORPG’s and constant superficial social activity such as in the phenomenon of continuous partial attention? Or will previous generations rise to the challenge?

This challenge, as I see it, is to provide high-level, dynamic tools for meaning and spaces that allow newer generations to interact – with the space and with each other – in such a way that their own understanding and meaning will come to the fore rather than any encapsulated form of ‘held wisdom’.

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Related References & Links:

[1] danah boyd discusses this and other characteristics of social networks in her concise and articulate MA thesis: FACETED ID/ENTITY: Managing representation in an online world. [Online: http://www.danah.org/papers/CSCW2004Workshop.pdf]

[2] Lifton, R.J. (1979) The Broken Connection: On death and the continuity of life. New York: Simon & Schuster.