Curiosity 31: Shared attention

I just read an opinion piece in the New York Times titled "Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back." It's basically a plea to pay attention—real attention—to the world around us, and, moreover, do it together, to remember that our experience is, or should be, shared experience. It's a plea for us to come together, instead of continually seeking out our own fractured and separate bubbles. 

It reminded me of the pleasure I took in some shared photo projects with my friend Susan in New Jersey (whom I've never met in person, but no matter: Susan's wonderful!), which I chronicled over the years here and here and here. Diptych projects: we'd both go out and find a photographic response to something—a letter of the alphabet, say—then put them together into a single two-frame image, and they always worked. It was so nice, to share our excitement and our sensibilities in a creative pursuit. Here are a couple of our results. The first is for N (we both went with "naked," in different ways), the second is for "soft."

Years ago, when I worked as a contributing editor/writer at the California Coastal Conservancy's Coast & Ocean magazine, the editor, Rasa Gustaitis, and I got into a practice of writing to prompts. It might be something like "toenails" or "sherbet" or a photograph, or once an actual topographic map sent through the mail, and we'd both sit and write as soon as we opened the email (or package) with the prompt, then share. It always pleased me to see how much we experienced similarly, and also differently. (Rasa is 20 years older than me, and was a refugee to this country during WWII, while I grew up in milquetoast Santa Monica in the 60s—so we're a bit different. And yet we also have so much in common.)

I think I still have at least some of those prompts, somewhere. I hope so. We often spoke about making a little book of them, illustrated with my photos. I should see if I can find them, and maybe go ahead and do that: two copies, one for her, one for me. Rasa will be 90 in May. It would be a sweet gift.

The above article states, "For two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy. But as once-familiar calls for an informed citizenry give way to fears of informational saturation and perpetual distraction, literacy becomes less urgent than attensity, the capacity for attention. What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry—human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together."

Yes! We need to look up and out at our world, together, absolutely. But that said, we cannot discount the dire need for literacy, an informed citizenry, and critical thinking. There is way too much belief today in lies and (dangerous) alternative realities, in the idea that my take on the world is more... something—important? real?—than yours. (Or maybe I should say your take, and you think it's more important than mine. It isn't, not if it's based in lies, propaganda, and ignorance.)

All of which, all the strife in the world, and the hate-mongering, makes me not so unhappy that I'll be dead soon. But not, I hope, before I take on a few more shared projects with good friends. Or just sit on the beach with a loved one and take in the world together with all our senses. Then share our experience of it all.