The Garden Of Human Attention (part 1)

Are you concerned or uncomfortable with how widespread smartphone usage has become? Or how much of our lives are online these days? This conversation between 93.7 The Light’s Jim Smith and author and Executive Editor for DesiringGod.org, David Mathis is full of wisdom and insight for the age we find ourselves in.

David Mathis Interview

Jim Smith: Joining me on the phone this morning, I’m so happy to introduce him to you. I’ve gotten to know some of his writing, I think he’s a wonderful writer. He happens to be the Executive Editor for DesiringGod.org, and if you don’t know, that’s the website that is associated with John Piper. David is also a pastor at Cities Church in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. He’s a husband, he’s a father of 4, and he’s joining us this morning on the telephone. Good morning, David!

David Mathis: Good morning, Jim! Very nice to be here with you.

Jim: Thanks for being here. Now, you wrote an article, and honestly, I told you before we went on the air here, I told you that I’ve saved probably five or six of your articles. You write quite a bit for DesiringGod.org and you wrote an article, the title of which really caught my attention- in fact, the word ‘attention’ is in the title. It’s called “Do You Have Your Attention?” Now, what’s the title of that article mean, David?

David: Well, an interesting thing in our modern world and economy is the value of human attention, and in particular the stakes are all the more in the internet age, the digital age where the biggest companies in the world today are no longer selling oil, but they’re selling human attention. You’ve heard of these companies: Apple, Facebook, and Google. The attention economy is the selling of our finite human attention that we give free of charge to places like Facebook and Google, then the pivoting of those companies to sell that attention to various marketers. It’s big business and the value that those companies are putting on human attention is a wakeup call for us Christians, to think about “what are we doing with our attention?” Do you have your attention? Or does somebody else have your attention? The story of the attention economy really goes back to the 19th century, to the 1830s, a newspaper businessman who had the realization that instead of just selling content in the newspaper, he could lower the price of the paper to only 1 cent if he got advertisers to pay him to put advertisements in the newspaper. So we’ve all just grown up with this, we’re so used to this. Part of getting a newspaper is that someone has bought ads to be in the newspaper and that drives down the cost. That had its manifestation in the newspaper era, it has had its manifestation in all the forms of various media. We know it so well on television and how we typically- depending on if we’re paying for cable or other things- there’s a lot of free TV out there if you’re willing to endure the ads. The advertisers are paying for the ads to get at the attention. One thing the internet has done- and in particular, social media- is the internet is able to really quantify that and objectify that very clearly with clicks, with certain times, with the follow through of a certain click to a certain action and so it’s made it more objective than it’s ever been. This has really made it the heyday of the attention economy. We’ve seen the return and we benefit from it in various ways. There can be great benefit from staying connected with friends and family on Facebook and on Instagram. At the same time, in giving Facebook and Instagram our attention, they’re able as a part of that transaction, to pivot and put before our eyes various marketing. Some of that we may want, and some of that we may not. The deeper issue then- this is the important thing to the Christian- is realizing the value of our human attention. It is finite. God has given us our attention, not just as a gift to use in whatever fascinating, entertaining, carnal way that we might, but our attention is vital to faith. Faith does not happen apart from attention. The Christian faith, saving faith- our very life grows in this finite garden of human attention. If we fill this garden with all sorts of other shrubs, we crowd out and suffocate and eventually, our faith shrivels and weakens and eventually dies. It’s a pressing issue for the Christian- to be reminded that your attention is very valuable. It’s even more valuable than Facebook knows. Even more valuable than Google can calculate because there’s an eternal value to our attention and how faith grows in the matrix and the garden of our attention.

Jim: You brought up the paradox of this “attention economy”. It’s occurred to all of us, I’m sure, that we love our smartphones, and there’s so much good that comes out of them that allows us to connect with people all across the world. I can be in this country and I can check a message that someone has sent me on my little portable device from across the globe, and yet- I’ve talked about this a lot with my wife- I’ll walk into a restaurant, almost every time I do, David, I’ll look at a table and there will be three or four people that are supposedly having a family meal together, and all of them have their heads buried in their phones. It’s such a distraction, isn’t it? 

David: It’s something for us to be aware of, as Christians, and thinking how we can own the age in which God has given us. It’s not our lot to pine for different times than the one that God has appointed to us. He’s put us in the digital age and we need to think carefully about that. In doing so, there are various advantages offered to us by social media and smartphones- but we need to be very careful about the drawbacks, very aware of those. It is one thing to say “Hey, I can contact a family member on the other side of the world!” That’s one advantage, but that advantage may be a very small thing compared to checking your phone 80 times an hour because of notifications, text messages and missing out on dinner with your longtime friend because you’re checking your phone and feeling the vibration in your pocket. I feel this so pressing, as a young father with four kids, ages nine to two, those moments at home are so precious. I can tell, they are passing so quickly already and I know I will look back with great nostalgia. 

We’re really trying to monitor screens. We have not chosen to keep our children totally from screens, but we’ve been very careful not to let them have free reign. They don’t grab a screen and turn on a screen whenever they want. We want to monitor both the content of the screen, but also, the patterns and the habits. We want our children to be well-accustomed to what it means to live in God’s full-orbed, 3 dimensional created world, and not taking in too much on screens, developing habits related to screens. One thing for parents to keep in mind to monitor, is not just the content of what’s on the screen, but the very medium itself, the very act of sitting in front of the screen or having the screen in their hand- a Kindle, or a smartphone, or an iPad or whatever- to think about that practice, those habits and what we’re inculcating in our children. Many of us would say we appreciate our phone, but to be honest, I don’t look back on my childhood and think ‘oh, I wish we would have had smartphones back then! I would have had such a better childhood, I would’ve been such a more fulfilled teenager if I had had a smartphone.’ When I look back, I think ‘I’m so glad there weren’t smartphones.’ My teenage years, I know, were richer because I didn’t have a smartphone!

Jim: What does this mean for followers of Jesus? Is this battle a new challenge for people of faith? 

David: In one sense, it’s not. There are new manifestations- this is so illuminating to me. What originally put me on this was 2 things: My colleague here at Desiring God, Tony Reinke, is one of the leaders in thinking about the digital age. He’s written a book: 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, and he’s got a new one called Competing Spectacles. In reading through a draft of Competing Spectacles, about a year before it came out, Tony was the first one that had some comments in footnotes relating to the “attention economy.” That got my attention in an initial way. And then what really drove it home, as a pastor preaching through 1 Timothy- our team at Cities Church, we have 3 of us that preach regularly and all 8 of us pastors will preach from time to time. We really believe in team preaching. So, we were working as a team through 1 Timothy this past spring, and my assignment was 1 Timothy 4:11-14, and the word for “attention” comes up again and again in 1 Timothy. Paul is confronting false teachers who are securing the attention of various people in the church and leading them astray. Apart from getting attention for their teaching, there’s not going to be any false teaching take root in Ephesus, which is who 1 Timothy is written to. So Paul is capturing this attention war- this is a 2000 year old attention war between sin, the world, and the devil against God, the apostles, and the Gospel. Paul is fighting an attention war as he’s talking to Timothy to see to it that the people direct their attention in God-ward ways, and God-ward patterns, that they do not give attention to the false teachers. That woke me up to it, not just in terms of the modern manifestation- this is something to think about in any generation: there is an attention war going on, because attention is related to faith and there’s a war going on for faith. There’s a war for the world, for the cosmos going on between God and the devil. God will win it… but people will be lost on the way and we don’t want to be among those, so we should look for the particular manifestations of this attention war that’s going on in our day. The battlelines are going right through the digital age for us in the 21st century. 

For the rest of this thought-provoking and timely interview, check out 93.7 The Light’s blog that will be published June 17.