Attention, please

What we lose when we stop paying attention

Photo by Le Vu 

I owe my family an apology. Last fall, over dinner, I announced that MTV was going off the air at the end of the year, based entirely on some SnapTokaGram post that I failed to fully read.

I’m also “sorry not sorry” because what followed was a hilarious conversation with our ten-year-old about what MTV was like during its heyday, what a music video is, and a detour down a YouTube rabbit hole of “I want my MTV” commercials. Somewhere between the Take On Me pencil-sketch video and Nirvana’s Unplugged performance, I fact checked myself and realized I had been scroll-suckered: MTV was not going off the air.

By the holidays, my MTV mix-up long forgotten, we set off on a mostly phone-free family vacation. And, while we were away, it was impossible not to notice how everyone else remained fully, reverently committed to their phones—staring at them instead of each other in restaurants, binge-watching tv shows on public transportation, and generally scrolling through life instead of living it.

On one bus, I watched the woman in front of me flick her almond-shaped nail through the filtered content on her phone in near-continuous motion for almost 45 minutes straight. She was scrolling too fast to see more than the bright, well-lit, and non-threatening content—or to hear more than a fragment of sound, if there was even a voiceover. It didn’t matter. The aesthetic was the hook; the product or ideology was secondary. She was just flushing her mind with a steady stream of warm, filtered nothing.

Her mindless scrolling was, I thought, the perfect example of the Massengill-ificiation of the modern age.¹

Massengill, and its competitor Summer’s Eve, for those too young to remember or lucky enough to have forgotten until now, were peak ‘80s douche commercials. They used soft-focus videos of pretty women dressed in white and pastels in calm, domestic or natural settings—the living room or the beach—to leverage anxiety about hygiene and romance to sell devices and liquid solutions to rinse out the vagina. If you didn’t listen to the voiceover, the commercial was almost completely (purposefully?) ambiguous. The ambiguity made it feel safe, comfortable, aspirational. It’s just pretty, feminine domestic happiness on the screen.²

Until you paid attention.

Then you realized you were watching an advertisement for a product that disrupts the natural balance of your vagina, is not effective or hygienic, and is considered at best unnecessary and at worst harmful³.

It’s hard not to notice how perfectly the word douche made the leap from product to insult. The Chad of its day, human douche is the performative, self-important attention seeker who offers no substance or care in return. The slang isn’t about hygiene at all; it’s about a failure of attention—an obsession with being seen paired with an inability (or refusal) to actually see others.

Without attention, everything becomes aesthetic: color, sound, texture, motion. Including people. Without attention, we flatten people down to two-dimensional, surface traits—their color, gender, weight, job. To recognize our shared humanity, we first have to actually see one another.

The word attention comes from the Latin attendre—”to stretch toward.” It’s active. Relational. Attention is the bridge: the stretch of expanse between our inner and outer worlds, and between one another. It is a conscious effort to reach toward another person and consider them fully.

Languages frame everyday actions differently, offering clues about cultural values. In Italian and French you do attention. In Spanish, you lend it. In German, you give it. In English, you pay it. So perhaps it’s no accident that Americans coined the term “attention economy.”

Attention, always one of our most desirable assets, is now quantified, priced, and monetized. And it’s the thing we’re flicking away with a well-manicured nail. For all my judgement, that’s exactly what I did when I announced MTV’s death with the (douchey) bravado of a Jackass stunt and roughly the same concern for the consequences. I didn’t lie; I just didn’t pay attention—and then behaved as if that didn’t matter.

But it does. We should be hair-on-fire concerned about fake news, aggregators, and media literacy. There are consequences, too, to not paying attention to one another. And maybe that’s where it all really begins. Tendre, the root of attention, also gives us contend, intention, portend, and tend.This is the ground from which our language about care grows. If attention is a practice of care, when we stop paying attention are we bankrupting our capacity to care? And is it possible that the constant public sharing of our lives is less narcissistic spectacle than (awkward) plea to be seen, to be cared for?

The scale of all of this freezes me. So I work smaller. As Valarie Kaur writes, I work to create the world I want to see in the space between us. That work happens in ordinary moments, when attention is easiest to withhold. It’s taking my earbuds out at the register, making eye contact with the person in front of me, not staying on my phone while someone is talking. It looks like listening without planning my reply, like allowing myself to be briefly bored. It looks like remembering that a person is not an interruption to my life, but part of it. It’s deciding—again and again—to stretch toward another person.

Take care,

Kelly

1. Yes, I just compared modern society to douche. History will decide if that’s unfair to douches.

2. See modern counterpart: Ballerina farm and tradwives

3. By medical professionals. And women who really didn’t—and still don’t—need another ad that exhorts us to be soft, inoffensive, and palatable.