Attention Theft Alert

I recently spent a most delightful and productive morning in a Parisian coffee shop. Delightful and productive mostly because, as the waiter informed me, the room I chose to sit in did not allow the use of computers or telephones. I might have already started to get up for another one of their lovely rooms, when I decided to ease myself back in the wide wooden chair, by a vegetal wall. So I rearranged my notebook, magazine, and article and, half-amused, half-curious, set out to see how long I could go without distractions. (Gloria Mark’s research shows the average we can ‘go without’ is 11 minutes).

The answer: two and a half hours spent reviewing a paper, writing for my journal, and enjoying a short story. It was quiet around me, and it helped me create some quiet space in my head as well. All of it made it easier to listen to what I really thinking, identify how I felt. It is not that I have a difficult time spending interruption-free mornings or afternoons. It is that the interruption-free time was imposed by the rules of a public place. So I owe the thought- and emotion-rich morning to the good people who decided to restrict people’s use of electronic devices in one room in their coffee shop.

So when a few days later I discovered Malcolm McCullough’s book Ambient Commons I knew just how much I had been robbed by needless interruptions and meaningless information plastered all around public spaces. McCullough ponders the consequences of what he calls ‘attention theft’ for our lives as dwellers of information-rich and visually polluted places. He argues about the need to tame the technologically mediated urbanism into a human place that allows for attention, surprise, boredom, insight. Places such as the lovely coffee shop on Seine’s bank are as necessary as fresh air, and they are a natural response to surroundings invaded by information media.

I am now trying to compile a list of such oases in the midst of the big city.