Attention and the Political Divide

In this hyper-accelerated world of information bombardment, our most scarce resource has become attention.

Our time-saving devices haven't given us more free-time, but instead allowed us to fill every last second of our lives with attention-demanding activity. Our nervous systems are maxed out. Advertisers feel the crunch, having to fight harder every year to get us to focus on their message, seeking out new methods and places to grab our precious attention. Meanwhile, power has been given to consumers to choose what messages they will pay attention to, with scores of TV channels, satellite radio, portable music players, internet news and entertainment, etc., all dividing our days into a thousand fleeting moments of attentiveness.

So when the political world heats up, and debate occurs over serious and contentious issues, the divide betweent the right and left is widened, because each side is paying attention to different things.

We have the choice of whether to watch Fox News or CNN, or PBS. Or we can skip TV altogether, and just read newspapers. And then we can choose to read only the sports section. We can choose to read trashy gossip magazines or we can read the Economist. We can choose to listen to Rush Limbaugh, or we can listen to NPR. And we are what we eat.

But our ability to choose our information diet is only part of the problem that has led to the deep political divide in America.

The other part is that none of us have enough time to be sufficiently exposed to the other side. Limitless choice has led to the "end of downtime"-- where we rarely reflect, ponder, or just let our minds rest. We have become accustomed to being bombarded with information, so instead of just tuning out, we just tune into the stations we like. Our attention is so precious, why waste it being enraged by people we can't stand?

Our information diets have become unbalanced.