For this impulse, I listened to the podcast ReThinking: The Truth About the Attention Crisis from the WorkLife with Adam Grant series, featuring historian Daniel Immerwahr. I kept thinking about it afterwards, especially because attention has slowly become an important part of how I understand my own research process.
I’ve often caught myself believing that my attention span is getting worse. It’s easy to blame phones, social media, or the constant availability of information. There is always something new to look at, something else to click on, and it becomes harder to stay with one thought for a longer period of time. I noticed this not only when working, but also when watching films, reading, or even visiting museums. My attention feels fragmented, constantly moving.
What interested me about this podcast was that it questioned this idea of the “attention crisis.” Instead of treating it as something entirely new, it suggested that people have worried about attention disappearing for a long time. This made me realise that attention is not just a personal ability that we either have or don’t have. It is something that is shaped by the environment we are in.
This connects strongly to experiences I’ve had recently. For example, as I mentioned in my previous blog entry: when I visited the Electric Cinema, I was able to watch a film with full attention, without distractions. The space itself allowed for that kind of focus. In contrast, when I visited the National Gallery, the large quantity of paintings made it harder to fully engage with individual works. It wasn’t because the paintings lacked meaning, but because my capacity to process them reached a limit.
This made me realise that attention is closely connected to structure and chaos. When there is too much information, everything starts to blur together. Nothing stands out anymore. But when there is enough space, attention can settle.
This idea feels very relevant to my thesis, where I am interested in chaos and how meaning is created within it. Chaos is not necessarily negative, but it can become overwhelming when there is no structure to navigate it. At the same time, too much structure can remove the unexpected moments that make things feel alive. Attention seems to exist somewhere in between these two states. It needs enough openness to allow discovery, but enough direction to allow focus.
The podcast made me reflect on attention not as something I need to “fix,” but as something that responds to context. It shifted my perspective from blaming myself for being distracted to observing the conditions that shape how I focus. This also changes how I think about creative direction. Directing attention is not about forcing control, but about creating environments where attention can naturally emerge.
For my research, this impulse reinforces the importance of atmosphere, structure, and context. It makes me more aware that meaning is not only created through content, but through how that content is experienced. Attention is not just an individual act, but something that is designed and influenced by the systems around us.
Links:
https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife
https://history.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core-faculty/daniel-immerwahr.html
