For your stray attention this weekend

On the things we notice

Hello,

Early on in my midwinter break, I picked up a magazine and learned something startling about my life online.

I was flicking through the pages of Condé Nast Traveller (my sole glossy indulgence; I like the pictures), and I paused, for a moment, to examine one of the hideous, diamond-spangled wristwatches that so enamour their editors. And then I noticed a thought: Move on quickly,  it said. They’ll think you like it, and you’ll never hear the end of it.

I looked up from the page, and blinked. It is absurd, of course, to imagine that anyone at Condé Nast has the slightest notion of where my attention lands. But in other parts of my life - the hours I spend every month browsing through the neat, tantalising grids of Instagram or Pinterest - my attention is being logged. 

It sounds paranoid to even suggest such a thing, but we know for a fact that it’s true. With a single click into the stats behind my Instagram Stories, I can not only see who has responded, but also who has simply looked. Their attention is registered; I can see it and name it. I can even tell what people have done in response, whether they exited or moved on to the next unit of information. I know what they know.

I choose very deliberately not to act on this information, or even to receive it in the first place. But it has made me conscious of the patterning of my own attention, the way that my eyes no longer alight anonymously, the way that a disinterested gaze is no longer possible. I thought how often I’d avoided even glancing at content that challenged my views, lest my attention be logged. I thought about how I’d sometimes avoided even noticing an unusual video or post, in case it changed my carefully ordered feed. It seemed to me, in that moment, that this was a kind of death. I was policing my own curiosity, limiting my ability to evaluate the new. I have been living - quite voluntarily - in a panopticon, never quite knowing when I was being observed, but changing my behaviour anyway.