Issue #15: Mastering the Art of Attention in the Age of Digital Distraction

Navigating the Noise: Strategies for Effective Communication in Group Chats

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Spoiler Alert: this post is relatively benign one and has to do with WhatsApp group chat annoyances, but we start and close with a semi-spiritual themes and hopefully some humor along the way.

Attention

Let me make one of those grandiose all encompassing spiritual claims that make sense on paper, yet its not clear how to apply in one’s life:

Attention is the most important tool to master, one who controls her attention, controls her life experience, energy and ultimately the destiny itself!

First, lets agree on some terms, when I refer to “attention”, I mean “the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli.”(source). Majority of modern parenting advice can be summed up as “just give them your attention”. Trouble in paradise? Likely one of the partners in the relationship is not giving the other enough attention. Anxiety? Depression? Stop paying attention to negative thoughts. Want to have a more abundant/fulfilled/connected/loving life? Just focus your attention on… pick your favorite manifestation modality. Want to reach non-duality, merge one with God the universe and everything? don’t pay attention to your mind, instead focus on the observer and see what arises.

We can think of attention as sort of a mechanism of our consciousness, that allows us to direct our awareness to a particular thing, be it a real thing out there in the physical world, or some phenomena arising as part of your experience. We often like to think that we have great control of this mechanism and can direct it at will to an area of our choosing, but in practice, its the very mechanism that gets hi-jacked all the time, either by our own thoughts and fantasies or by external stimuli. Think of the classical social media doomsday scrolling scenarios, where entire platforms have been created whose sole purpose is to keep our attention occupied by the platform and the second attention starts to flee, the next video/post pops-up to grab it. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching an Octopus stuck in a closed jar, magically figure out the rotating mechanism of a lid and let itself out as much as the next guy, but did I choose to spend my attention on that or did it somehow sneak itself into my world and now instead of watching the ballet performance of my 10-year old who’s been preparing for it for months, I’m somehow stuck in Octopus land?

Some of us are good masters of our attention and guard it like a precious resource that it is, in fact I suspect those people haven’t even made it to this line, while others, like me, are easily distracted by internal or external stimuli and are happy to go on a roller coaster ride of thought hopping or micro-dopamine hits that the modern internet provides.

This brings me to today’s topic: WhatsApp! The ultimate attention-hog, depending on your usage pattern and where you live, you can easily be in 50+ somewhat active group chats at any time, giving your attention to some or all of them at some point in your day. While we can talk about strategies of optimizing that, I’d like to bring up the other side of this challenge - the posting side. When you post a message to a group, however small, you are likely consuming attention of at least some of the people in that group.

Lets say you’re sitting at home enjoying dinner with family while a random person you don’t know, lets call him John, happens to be in Orotina, 5km from you, in a pharmacy looking for ibuprofen. He asks the pharmacist: “Do you have ibuprofen?” and a short exchange unfolds. Question: Should your dinner be interrupted at that point so that you can listen in on that exchange? If not, should you later take even a split second of your precious attention, to listen or read the transcript of that exchange? In fact, is there any value for anyone except John and the Pharmacist to become aware of such an exchange? And yet, something similar routinely happens in our group-chat eco-system.

To solve for that, I propose a few minor changes, that I believe will greatly improve the situation(this is the funny part):

1. We remove all people who lived in the valley for less then 6 months from the group chats. Like turtles born on the beach somehow make their way to the water, so too the new comers will find their way.

2. We pitch-in for a large road-side poster that we put on that times-square like area on the way to San Mateo with the rest of the local posters, which will read: “Need a Taxi? Call Charlie: 6125 0728”

3. We elect Human as the admin for all group chats and bestow on him the title of Benevolent Group Chat Dictator and allow him to remove people, delete posts and in general police the chats as he sees fit.

Best Practices

But seriously! I think we can do better. Here are some practices we can embrace that are relevant for large group chats:

1. Post it Once, Post it in the Right place. Sometimes you’re itching for an answer or you’d like to make sure your offering is discovered by as many people as possible, but when you dual or triple-post the same question/offering to multiple groups, especially if you know those groups have 80% membership overlap, you’re showing that you don’t value our collective attention.

2. Validate, Don’t Agitate. People post things, sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re insightful, sometimes they’re just helpful! We want to validate that, we want them to know that we paid attention and we are grateful for whatever insight they provided. Holding the message down, and putting an emoji of your choosing on it does a great job at letting the poster know that their efforts are valued. Replying with “Thank You” or another 3-5 word affirmation does that as well, but it agitates the other 195 members of the group who did not need to read it / see it and it adds noise to the overall group. Sometimes you really want to say Thank You to the person, thats cool, just DM them…

3. And speaking of DMs! I always wondered who exactly is the “I’ll DM You” message for? Presumably you are DMing the person, once you DM them, they’ll know that you have DMed them. Does everyone else in the group need to know that you’ll be DMing them?

4. Look at this cool video I found on internet. I literally have entire groups just dedicated to this and I love them. In fact FB/Insta/TikTok are huge platforms dedicated to just this. We should decide in which groups is this appropriate and in which it isn’t. Leaving it to chance, opens up to someone randomly posting a little video, which then gives permission to others to do the same and before you know it, our Group Chats look like Instagram.

5. Where can I buy a Yoga Mat? Yes, most of us do some form of Yoga and yes, most of us have at one point or another found the need to buy a mat, or take a taxi, or find a mechanic, or order some food, or get a restaurant recommendation. It’s ok to ask, but once you get an answer, see if you can contribute back to the communal knowledge store.

I’m sure there are more, in fact if you have another suggestion you’d like to include, please DM me (just don’t say: “I’ll DM You”). We can collect these “Group Chat Best Practices” in one place and then each admin can decide which ones if any they feel is appropriate to adopt and declare it in their welcome message/group description.

A call to inquiry

(Below is from Charles and Patsy, reproduced from here: https://www.naascommunity.org/landing
it touches on the same themes and is more applicable to heavy discussion groups such as communal chats)

Gigi Coyle, my dear friend and a teacher of the Way of Council, offers a mantra for speaking in circle that I think can be profitably translated into online conversations. The mantra is W.A.I.T. – “Why am I talking?” On the surface level, it is an antidote to habits of dominating others with ones speech, or speaking to get attention or approval, demonstrating how smart you are, or signaling in-group membership. All of these habits can dilute the power of our words. WAIT, however, is not actually meant as a device to suppress those habits; it is meant to illuminate them. It is not a rule that says, “Never speak if you are just doing it to gain approval, seek attention, show off, etc.” It says, “If you do that, know that you are doing that.”

WAIT springs from a deep trust in human beings, that says whatever wound or insecurity might drive your habits of speech, who you really are and what you really want is to serve the group, the conversation, and the higher purpose that brought it together.

In WAITing, we understand ourselves as more than separate individuals. Many voices, each with different motivations and goals, murmur within us and around us: the voice of the ego, the inner child, the higher self; the voice of beings of nature, spirits, and ancestors; the voice of social forces like patriarchy or peace; archetypal voices to which we may be attuned…. Which shall we allow to issue from our mouths or fingertips? Gigi asks, “Which one wants and needs to speak? Which one may be heard and actually serve life, healing, and contribute to more love, truth and wholeness?”

In an actual circle of humans, only one person can intelligibly speak at once. On an online forum, many conversations can run simultaneously. Attention-seeking or dominating speech can’t monopolize the group’s listening as it can in a live gathering. Nonetheless, people (hopefully) have lives off line too. If they read your post, then they are not doing something else. So another motivation for WAIT is the recognition that the attention of other people is precious. In fact, if I may wax metaphysical for a moment here, attention is the only thing we truly possess. Whatever we pay attention to is a kind of food. By paying attention to something, we accept its imprint and it becomes part of ourselves. To offer something for another person’s attention is not a trivial act. WAIT recognizes that and helps bring consciousness to that offering. Therefore, it too is a principle of reverence.

The question “Why am I talking (or posting)?” might not have an answer you can explain in words. The answer could well be a feeling. What feeling-state are these words coming from? Who am I, as I speak this? WAIT is a moment of self-considering, a mental and emotional check-in, that may result in hitting delete, or in changing some wording, or in replacing the words with others, or in no change at all. It helps uncover what one really wants to say (or not say).

As with reverence, WAIT allows light-hearted banter, humor, wit, and customs of etiquette, as well as discussion of personal and social issues. It is not an overriding rule or guilt trip meant to squelch bad speech. It operates from underneath, subtly aligning conversations to their best potential. It also establishes a habit of mindful intention that may bleed over into other areas of life. By maintaining a constant background question of “Who am I, really?” it induces, on the community level, an inquiry and an awareness of “Who are we, really?”

I don't know the answer to that question now. In fact I am deliberately cultivating a state of open curiosity about that, letting go of ideas about what it should be. I invite you all to do the same. Let us see what emerges.