I’ve written before about the time-cost of content, but time is not the only cost associated with consuming content.
If I were to lay out a more complete picture of this time-for-content exchange, it would probably look something like this:
content costs attention
attention costs time
time costs opportunity
Of these three costs — opportunity, time, and attention — attention is maybe the most important. I really don’t think that many people consider seriously enough the implications of asking others to pay attention to their content. After all, attention is the raw material which makes up our very experience of existence.
In her 2009 book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher puts it this way:
“
If you could look backwards at your years thus far, you’d see that your life has been fashioned by what you’ve paid attention to and what you haven’t. You’d observe that of the myriad sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that you could have focused on, you selected a relative few, which became what you’ve confidently called “reality.” You’d also be struck by the fact that if you had paid attention to other things, your reality and your life would be very different.
Seen in this light, I think everyone who creates content would have a much different idea of the responsibility that comes with asking others for attention.1
One way to be conscientious about this reality is to ask yourself when you begin to create content:
“How do I want people to be different after they experience my content?”
Because people will be different after they experience your content.
- there is also responsibility associated with the paying of attention, but that is not the issue at hand ↩︎
