The challenge for all of us is to know when we are part of a true audience: when our presence is part of the presenter’s consciousness.
The Broadway actress Patti LuPone is apparently at the end of her tether. As was recently reported in the New York Times, during a performance of a play at Lincoln Center she grew frustrated with an audience member who texted continuously through an entire act. The texter was downfront, just a few feet from the actors. Finally, at the conclusion of the last scene LuPone grabbed the offending phone from the audience member as she left the stage.
The problem of audience members otherwise engaged has been more common in recent years, notwithstanding pleas from theater managers that audiences shut down their arsenals of personal hardware before the lights go down.
As for LuPone, the multiple Tony winner reports that she is utterly defeated by audience members staring into blue screens. With dismay she notes that she may give up working in live theater.1
Anyone who makes any kind of presentation to a group knows how daunting it can be to remain effective when an audience member visible to the presenter has decided to opt for an electronic environment over the one they are in. Any electronic surrogate that gets more attention than the human who striving to connect is bound to produce some justifiable anger. Making a choice in favor of the device not only signals a kind of aggressive indifference to the performer, but other audience members as well. In its own small way, it’s an tacit act of sabotage against a presenter who has a right to expect at least minimal responsiveness.
To say that as a culture we have a problem with granting others our sustained attention is obvious, and not completely attributable to our growing obsession with constant connectivity. Commanding the interest of others always requires the mastery of a very narrow path that threads its way between vast spaces of boredom and distraction.
Cayleigh Goodson aptly illustrates this lack of focus that seems to make attention deficits an emerging norm .
Research on the nature of the fickle human attention span includes a lot of cautionary conclusions. Among them,
Attention Is Intermittent Rather Than Continuous. We make a serious mistake if we believe that humans give themselves over to just one thing at a time. This only happens in times of emergency. Otherwise, our attention to one object wonders, turning on and off faster than lights on a traffic signal. This is why oral presentations need some tactful redundancy.
Demands On Americans For Attention Are Enormous. It comes as no surprise that we have immersed ourselves in environments that flood us with messages. In the pre-electronic world it was not always this way. Previous generations more or less chose their communication moments, especially when work was a more solitary process. Now the arrows are mostly reversed. Those moments mostly choose us: a result of the constant connectivity of e-mail, texts and other proliferating forms of social media.
The Rate Of Decay For The Retention Of Content IsVery Steep. We could not function effectively if burdened with the cognitive consequences of all that we take in. So our brains protect our sanity by discarding most of the data that washes over us. With its emphasis on ceaseless mayhem, news alone would drain our abilities to act on the premise that every event is potentially transformative. So our restless information-processing requires that we ignore a lot, sometimes making us useless as engaged interlocuteurs.
From this last perspective, Patti LuPone is just another momentary intrusion in a continuous parade of incoming stimuli. But she has a right to be ticked off. The challenge for all of us is to know when we are part of a true audience. There’s a simple imperative we need to honor: When our presence is part of the presenter’s consciousness, we should act on the clear obligation to be responsive to their efforts.
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1Erik Piepenburg “Hold the Phone, It’s Patti LuPone,” New York Times, July 9, 2015.
To the digital native, being truly alone without some sort of external distraction is—irony of ironies—”unnatural,” almost as if the chatter from our own mind is the rhetoric of a stranger.
We can easily feel the burdens of having more knowledge than we can handle. Searching online is like trying to drink from a fire hose. We should have known it would happen when “Google” became a verb in addition to a noun. Type in something as straightforward as “Green Mountains of Vermont,” and you’ll get about 3.3 million hits. Similarly, catch a few minutes of CNN in an airport and perhaps you get the deaths of children in a bombed Gaza hospital, news of a missing airliner, killer tornadoes in the Midwest.
The hose analogy is suggestive, but the proportions are probably wrong. Our pervasive media use is more like trying to snag a cup of water from one of the massive outflow tunnels exiting the bottom of Hoover Dam. The point is the same: the flood of information coming at us from digital sources is simply overwhelming, giving rise to another common water-based cliche: How do we “tame the information tide?”
We all know the sources that push us away from ourselves. In addition to online searches there are mobile phones, phone apps, tweets and texts, e-mail, cable and broadcast programming, news alerts, RSS feeds, Facebook “notifications,” not to mention blogs like this one. In addition, many of us are still deeply dependent on newspapers, magazines, movies, product catalogs, Pandora, MP3s, radio and podcasts. Every waking minute of every day offers some distraction to drain away our abilities to focus, concentrate and—most ominously—face the unpredictable beast of our own thoughts.
On a commuter train recently it was hard to not hear the increasingly heated cell phone conversation unfolding between a passenger and her mother. It sounded like both sides were picking old wounds that have never quite healed. Charges of emotional neglect and indifference hurled back and forth. The rider’s injunctions were laced with scorn. And she seemed to not notice that others where an involuntary audience to her woes.
One could not help but think: was this really the best moment to have this discussion? Shouldn’t precious and fragile family relations be maintained in a better setting that could increase the chances of a better result? In other words, must we accept the socially awkward terms of usage that new media randomly impose on us? We seem increasingly unable to manage our informational world.
To say we pay a price for trying to bear up under media intrusions of our own making is now obvious. For most of us the compulsion to keep checking back on the open channels we have set up is nearly total and time consuming. We choose to keep our digital companions on. We willingly succumb to the “breaking news” story from a cable news outlet, or the random tweets and texts of others. We may even stop a lively conversation to check a minor disputed fact that has just surfaced.
For the privilege of total immersion, we pay the price of slowly alienating ourselves from ourselves. To the digital native, being truly alone without some sort of external distraction is—irony of ironies—unnatural: almost as if the chatter coming from our own mind is the rhetoric of a stranger.
That’s a problem because we probably have some interesting things to hear from our inner selves. A common view is that our intrapersonal chatter is often dysfunctional: full of anxieties, useless fantasies, and other forms of impractical mental skywriting. But all these attributes of consciousness contribute to our self-awareness. They are important. We need time to work this stuff out. They are among the reasons we walk and sleep. Not giving ourselves the time to know what we think sets us up to be aimless and disoriented.
To be sure, if media theory tells us anything, it is that our media-use habits don’t revert. There’s no waiting-for-a-phone-call Meet-Me-in-St.-Louis future for any of us. Media evolve, and we do our best to keep up. We just have to work a little harder to not allow them to squeeze a precious sentience out of our lives.
The next time you are stuck waiting for something to happen, try listening to the productive insights that your brain has on offer. The trick is moving past the momentary boredom of being truly “with” yourself. Soon enough you will discover the neglected personal business that truly matters.
