The Battle for Attention
How do we hold on to what matters in a distracted age?
If you can make it to the end of this paragraph without scrolling away, well, you’re remarkable. As Nathan Heller learned in reporting this engrossing piece about a secret society devoted to paying attention, people can focus on a single screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds. Among those trying to understand why we can’t stay focussed is D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton. He has argued that the original impetus for fast tools and fast lives is human desire, rather than technological innovation. “The acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability,” Heller explains, “but an ideological outcome.” Burnett is also, secretly, a Bird.
A what? The Order of the Third Bird is an underground international fellowship, made up of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists who try to understand what attention is, how to channel it, what it can do. Named for a piece of lore about three birds encountering a painting by the ancient artist Zeuxis—the first is scared away, the second is confused, and the third just looks—the Birds, Heller explains, “converge, flash-mob style, at museums, stare intensely at a work of art for half an hour, and vanish, their twee-seeming feat of attention complete.”
Heller wants in on the action, and through his connection with Burnett he attends several events in New York. At the New Museum, the Birds put security guards on alert; in front of a public sculpture by Peter Lundberg near the George Washington Bridge, he watches “the group wield their strange power on the art work” and wonders, “Could it have been my own imagination that the steel flanks of the sculpture seemed to flash with new importance under the force of their attention?”
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