I
had an interesting discussion with some of my colleagues this evening
about how they, and the people they know, pay attention, and divide
their attention, and how this appears to be changing from generation to
generation.
Some of their observations were not new: We are all
splitting our attention more finely than we used to. Younger
generations are learning to do this even more finely than ours has, the
phenomenon called continuous partial attention, though there seems to
be some consensus that this dividing of attention is more a rapid
sequential process than a simultaneous one. We seem to become bored
more easily if there is insufficient stimulus to demand our constant,
full attention, and start to browse the room (physical or virtual),
consciously or subconsciously, for more stimulus when our minds and/or
emotions are not fully engaged.
Some of their observations were,
I thought, novel and provocative: Partly because we're always fighting
for attention, perhaps, the nature of spoken and real-time written (IM)
communication seems to have evolved from relatively slow, thoughtful,
considered communication to more rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness,
iterative, successive-approximation communication. Efficiency and
economy are sacrificed for effectiveness. Whereas I think I understood what you used to say, the first time you said it, today I know
what you're saying, because after ten clarifications and restatements
there can no longer be any doubt. And maybe it takes longer today for
that greater certainty, in the spaces between the clarifications and
restatements I also understood what six other people told me on other
subjects, interwoven with my conversation with you. If you were the
only person I was conversing with at the time, I might well have become
impatient with you. But increasingly, we constantly juggle and
interleaf multiple conversations.
What is lost in this splitting
of attention? When we pay attention to more and more things in rapid
succession, we must inevitably stop paying attention to something else.
I suspect that successive-approximation communication interferes with
our ability to fully listen
-- there just isn't time, enough mental cycles for us to do so. We are
therefore, I'd suggest, missing nuances in the conversation -- the
meaning that is contained in silences, hesitation, inflection, tone,
and the semi-subconscious awareness of what is implied by the choice of
one word over another, by phraseology, by the connotation and
implication and what might have provoked a statement, not just its
denotation.
Even more, because we are scanning words while we're
listening, we're missing the important visual clues that accompany a
message in face-to-face or videoconferenced conversation: facial
expression, body language, and what we can 'read' in the eyes of the
person we are talking to. In fact, I suspect that some of the
discomfort I see in young people engaged in one-on-one, face-to-face
conversation is because they're just not experienced or practiced in
such conversation, and find its intimacy alarming and disorienting. At
age 55, when I'm speaking with a woman who is looking at me intently as
we talk, for example, I don't think I am likely to misconstrue her
attention (e.g. as coming on to me, staring at me because of something
peculiar about my appearance, or angry at me). I've learned to
interpret these signals in context, from practice. I'm not sure many
young people who practice rapid sequential language processing have
that acuity, and I'm a little concerned that, for lack of practice and
attention, they may never develop it. And if so, that's a shame, not
only because some important communication need not or cannot be
verbal*, but because I think the intimacy of non-verbal communication
is important for our emotional well-being.
But maybe I'm just
getting old and nostalgic. Have you noticed any of this in your own
conversations? In what other ways are the ways we communicate, and the
ways we pay attention, evolving, for better or for worse?
*Verbal means oral or written, i.e. using language. This word is often misused to mean just oral, spoken.
Painting "In Deep Conversation" by Irish artist Pam O'Connell
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