Seeking attention
On the merits of a small and low-key audience
Our online world seems to run on attention: gathering an audience, maximizing engagement, monetizing it to advertisers and others. I have written previously about attention: both what it means to pay attention, and about the limits of multitasking. I’ve also considered a couple of topics that are adjacent to attention: politics in an attention economy, as well as phubbing. However, I haven’t really considered anything about my own writing and how to understand it as a form of attention seeking. What does it mean to seek attention from others? And more specifically, what is involved in trying to produce writing that is interesting to others?
My essay writing starts when my own attention lands on something of interest. Usually there is some phrase that I jot down as a summary of a core idea. I work to understand what is interesting about it, and what might be interesting to other people. I want to be able to translate the time and attention that I spend into something that is worth the time and attention that a reader would spend. If this process works as I intend, then the reader should be able to spend less time than I did in the writing, while learning some of the same information that I did. In a way, my goal in writing is to distill attention.
Naturally, not everything I try is successful. Sometimes, I can’t make a coherent essay out of my initial interest. Other times, I think that I have succeeded, but it’s not sufficiently interesting for readers. That’s partly because different people have different tastes and interests. Indeed, when we think about what it means to have an interest or a taste, we recognize that it is effectively a summary of what one considers worthy of one’s attention. With this perspective, having “good taste” is not a snooty aesthetic concern. Instead, good taste is a foundational survival skill in a world full of nefarious efforts to waste your precious time and steal your precious attention.
In writing, I strive for authenticity. When I am writing, I have no audience to please, nor any commitment for a deliverable, beyond my self-imposed weekly schedule and my own ideas about what constitutes “good enough” or “interesting enough.” I am satisfied with the arrangement: whether other people like my writing or not, I know that I’m doing what I choose to do with the time I have available. I enjoy the experience when someone likes it or comments on it, but I am wary of writing for engagement. A few dozen occasional readers feels like the right size audience for my purposes. That’s enough so that I’m pretty sure at least one other person reads what I’ve written, but not so many that I need to be concerned about an angry mob pursuing me because I’ve offended them. It’s also important that I do this writing as an amateur, not a professional: although I want to write every week, my success or failure as a writer doesn’t affect whether I can (say) pay the electric bill.
As a writer, I recognize there is a potential trap in pursuing attention. The positive version of pursuing attention is thinking about what kind of writing would be useful or helpful to other people. The classic example of such thinking is the idea that you should write the book(s) that you would want to read, whenever you can’t find it/them already existing in the world. Even if it turns out that you’re the only person who cares about that book, at least one person has benefited.
However, the negative version of pursuing attention leads to pandering and clickbait, cranking out drivel that’s somehow “hot” in the present moment. Online publication makes it very easy to be concerned with readership numbers and clickthroughs.
I have two practices that (I think) help me avoid the worst negatives.
First, I try to avoid writing anything that will be predictably dated. I respect journalism and its role as the “first draft of history,” but that’s not my style. I’d rather invest my efforts in something that has a chance of still being relevant and interesting a few years down the road. I may not succeed, but at least I’m trying to produce something of lasting relevance.
Second, I am the primary audience for my writing. In the tradition of Montaigne, I write initially to think things through, to work on issues that puzzle or excite me, to better understand myself and the world. Accordingly, my usual assumption is that I will publish an essay and absolutely nothing will happen.
Most of the time, it’s relatively easy to stick to these practices. Even if I feel motivated by something in the news, or I want to try convincing people, I consider whether there is some longer-term point and focus on that.
One good example of this is the writing in my book Bits to Bitcoin: each time I’ve revisited it, I’m happy that it doesn’t seem dated. One of my children alerted me that my book was the most prominent result when googling “Thompson’s Hack.” That is an interesting kind of fame, if obviously narrow and fragile (indeed, my book is no longer at the head of the list, although it is still among the results of that query).
I approach my writing with some humility, since I recognize that I may be completely wrong in my efforts. Indeed, it’s striking how often I have been wrong in my predictions of audience response to my work: something that I really like gets few readers and no engagement, while what I think of as a half-assed last-minute near-failure resonates with many.
In my undergraduate years, the director of our university choir was admirably low-key in his assessment of the broad spectrum of music we took on. He observed that you can look at the long history of Western choral music and see the ways that composers and styles have gone in and out of favor. There’s no reason to believe that our generation has the final word on that assessment. His attitude was that we would just do our part, and future musicologists would be our judges. I feel likewise about my writing: it may be something that matters in the future, or it may not be; that judgment will be up to other people, not myself.