Michael H. Goldhaber

TIME AND ATTENTION
It is commonly thought that attention can be equated with time. “I will give you fifteen minutes of my time,” often implies that speaker will pay attention for those fifteen minutes. It would be a mistake though, to think that this formulation means that attention is particularly tied with time. All human activities — eating or walking just as much as paying attention— occur in time, and each one has some duration. But the time taken has little to do with the quality or even the intensity of the attention paid.
Since attention involves the aligning of mind, and since this can be more or less permanent depending on how deeply you allowed yourself to align in the first place, you might well find that you continue to pay attention long after the actual encounter with the person, or with her expression (in the form of a note, a text, a voice message, and e-mail, a website, or a work of art or design of any sort).

Thus, if you have a reasonable visual imagination, for instance, you can probably recall a lot about the look of the person, or of a photo or painting by her. (So, you can bring to mind an image of Albert Einstein, Jay Leno, or Brittney Spears or the Mona Lisa, Picasso’s Guernica, or Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, the general look of a Jackson Pollock or the photo of the flag raising on Iwo Jima, among thousands of others.) Likewise, with a good memory for sounds, you can recall at least snatches of music. You retain and bring to mind precepts, concepts, explanations, strictures and many other kinds of expressions you paid attention to earlier, as well as in many cases the person you associate with them. Thus the actual count of seconds of first paying attention has little meaning.

Also, in the time you supposedly allot to someone or their expression, you may find it hard to alig. You are likely to be bored so your mind will wander. If say, you are a psychotherapist, you may have learned to listen very intently, but still a particular client may fail to engage you. In that case, you might decide to examine what it is about how you are interacting with the client that leaves you so bored, and in that way perhaps return attention to her, as well as possibly learning something about yourself. But that is only if you so choose; for that you must feel a certain dedication, possibly through paying attention to someone who trained you. Whether you are being paid for such an encounter or not, it is again untrue that you can be thought to hand over definite chunk of time.

In sum, attention DOES NOT EQUAL time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Writings, Attention Economy, What is attention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.