Published in the Mountainview
Technology maven Esther Dyson recently said, "The most
important finite resource in the late 20th century is people's attention."
Nothing could be more correct Information is flowing into our lives faster than
ever before. Information about places and people previously unheard of is now
meeting us for breakfast, in the morning paper and on the morning news
programs.
Who a hundred years ago would have thought that the struggle
for power of an overweening rich man, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire , would
headline world news? We are inclined to ask why this is important to Americans.
It is clearly of importance to the people of Zaire and neighboring countries.
Don't we have enough to worry about? Social activists
constantly remind us of human rights tragedies around the world and in the United States , Amnesty International makes a
point of including the U.S.
in its annual reports on the world's worst human-rights offenders. Don't we
have enough to do, here at home? Shouldn't our attention be spent on cleaning
our own house, rather than throwing stones at the glass houses others inhabit?
Isn't that, even if a productive use of our own time and energy, distracting
them from the pressing problems of their worlds?
Attention is something we must ration carefully; Dyson is
correct. We have only so much time to spend on anything. only so much mental
energy before we need sleep, respite, or a good beer. We must choose what we
pay attention to; we cannot afford to choose unwisely, How, then, should we
determine what to ignore? Or should we ignore nothing, sufficing with short
blurbs about everything, reducing our knowledge to trivia and our understanding
to mere chronology?
As individuals, we each have certain special interests. Mine
may relate to technology and the communications revolution; yours may be in
environmentally-aware architecture. Each of us follows a certain set of topics,
from sports teams and academic disciplines to current events in the domestic
affairs of particular nations. As a nation, we have certain collective
interests. Health insurance for all Americans is something to which we should
each bend an ear from time to time. We also need to know where our elected
representatives stand on the Chemical Weapons Ban Treaty and nuclear
non-proliferation. These indicate, however, that there is an overlap in
individual, domestic national, and international levels of interest.
The line between what we pay attention to and what we ignore
is fuzzy at best. It is no less clear for the fact that daily events occur
which we could not have predicted but which directly affect our lives. Would
anyone argue that Americans should ignore the threat to our own individual
personal safety posed by the Oklahoma
City bombing? Would anyone argue that Americans at
large ever expected such an event to occur? We need to pay attention to people
telling us things we haven't asked about, which we don't know about to be
interested in them.
And so our attention is again stretched, unfocused,
confused. Can we just shut off the world, even for a short time, and listen to
the silence? In the age of digital timekeeping, silence is just that; there's
not even a clock ticking to remind us of time passing. Silence can be
wonderful, and relaxation, departure from this hectic world refreshing. It is
imperative that, at the same time as we learn to take in, process, and
comprehend more and more information, we also learn to take time for ourselves
to remain in balance.
To do otherwise would be to invite disaster of a cognitive
nature. The world closes in around us, and we must learn to escape it or risk
being enveloped by it. Our attention must be focused on yet another subject:
our own personal, societal, and human well-being: This is the area in which it
is most imperative that we all pay attention. We must all confer upon each other
the human dignities we ourselves desire; we must respect the space and time of
others, and the fact that they, too, suffer from the same attention deficit we
do. Our time here is limited, and to make the most of it some things must fall
by the wayside.
Each of us must decide individually what to leave behind and
what to carry forward. Those who strive to do too much or too little will risk
failure and insignificance, both individually and societally. Balance is the
key: our resources are indeed finite.