Black Marias Of The Mind: The Transformational Power of the Attention Economy
2020 was historic. Many of us spent a good part of it with our eyes fixed on screens, watching for news of the virus, the presidential election and riots. And to get a break from the news, we have fixed more attention on movies and shows. We are told that we now live in the attention economy. Information is abundant, attention is scarce. There is too much to see, too much to do, too much to worry about. We carry around supercomputers in our pockets, tools that offer to make our lives simpler. They are supposed to help, and they do, but they also eat up lots of our attention and have done little to keep us from becoming more stressed, depressed and distracted than ever before. Our technology is still so novel in the grand scheme of humanity that it is hard to discern what it is doing to us. Moving pictures have only been around for a little over a hundred years.
It all started with Thomas Edison who built the first movie studio in 1893 on the grounds of his New Jersey laboratory. Early film required a lot of light, much more than could be produced by electric bulbs at the time, so the studio had a giant moveable ceiling that opened up to let in the daylight. In fact, the entire building was built on a track so it could rotate to follow the sun. Even with its skylight, the workers found Edison’s studio dark and claustrophobic, which earned it the nickname “The Black Maria,” after the police paddy wagons of the day.
Edison’s early movies were often less than a minute long. They featured boxers, acrobats and vaudeville actors performing skits. The earliest moving pictures were seen through a Kinetoscope. This was a box with a peephole on the top. To use it, you had to lean over the box and press your face against it to look down through the opening. There you could see grainy black and white moving images of people fighting or dancing. It was sort of a carnival novelty, but it was the progenitor of theaters, televisions and handheld screens.
All things considered, things are not so different today. We still gaze into little inscrutable boxes in order to be amazed and entertained. As the technology of the moving image has improved, the things we watch have become much better at holding our attention. We spend hours of the day, years of our lives, staring into our little black boxes, only now our little screens stare back at us. They look into our hearts and tell us what we want.
Anyone who has ever learned a trade or an instrument or gone to school for a degree understands the amount of time it takes to acquire a skill. There are shortcuts to learning, but no substitute for giving your attention to a subject in order to understand and master it. You have to want it. The process of learning has the strange effect of also changing you. If you learn to speak a new language, for instance, your brain has been rewired. If you study architecture and become an architect, you not only acquire a new title, but become someone capable of changing the world through your designs. What we learn and do, through the giving of our attention, doesn’t only change us, it changes the world. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes that it takes 10,000 hours of proper attention to master a subject. The average American will have easily spent that amount of time consuming media by the age of 20.
As we enter into the new year, it is worth considering how our media is changing us. We have a substantial measure of control over what we give our attention to. It is important to take significant breaks from the constant stream of media. If you are so inclined, go outside, notice the world around you. Listen to the birds or the traffic. Listen for your intuition. I am not suggesting trying to put the technology back in its box, but put it in its place. The Black Maria and the Kinetoscope are powerful symbols of our devotion to the image. We have to be careful not to become the captive audience of our own productions, programmed by the programming we consume. The choice is ours.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2)
