I spend a lot of time these days thinking about love and where to find it. In classes, in bars, at work I see a lot of single people who are looking for love. (I also see a lot of people in relationships who are checking around to see if there’s anything better, but that’s another story).
There are a lot of dimensions to love - sex, romance, marriage - but the one I’m interested in the most these days is simple interest and attention. Who pays attention to whom and why?
Physical Attractiveness
Everyone understands the importance of physical attractiveness. Attractive people make us feel good when we look at them - we want to keep looking, maybe even turn our heads when they pass by. In contrast ugly people make us cringe, even if only subconsciously.
Shortage of Attention to Give
Surely not everyone is equally attractive. But even if everyone got gradually more and more attractive, there wouldn’t necessarily be more attention to go around. People’s ability to give attention is probably fairly fixed - so being more attractive just makes it possible for you to take attention away from someone else.
Attention in Myspace
In any communication medium messages are directional. Whether it is a phone conversation or email, someone usually initiates a conversation. Sometimes these attempts to initiate work and sometimes they bounce… In any case, we can say that the initiating party seeks the attention of the other party. We could draw a graph where people are nodes and initiations are directed arcs.
What would such a graph tell us about our society?
We would probably find that there are a couple categories of people:
- Stars: people who receive more attention than they can possibly return
- Social butterflies: people who seek out lots of attention
- Average people: who give and receive a medium attention
- Recluse: people who give and receive little attention
You could rate people based on the total attention they receive, or based on the ratio of attention received to attention given out. As a social engineering experiment, we might find the following:
- Every star creates several wallflowers because they soak up the limited available attention from many people.
- If you want to help with the global attention shortage, give out more attention than you receive.
The last principle is easily misapplied. When I’m thinking of pay more attention to people, I immediately think of the most interesting or attractive people around - the sort of low-grade rock stars of my world. I have to remember to pay attention to others.
Now that *is* interesting. Attention from some people is desireable, but others not so much. Maybe what matters is not the total attention that’s available to go around, but the attention available from attractive interesting people. If we increase the number of these people, we might get somewhere.
