Can We Still Pay Attention to Each Other?

A dangerous idea has become commonplace: that someone not in our presence can have as much claim on our attention as the person we are actually with. We feel the buzzing and we instinctively grab for the phone to see who's texting. While taking a look and maybe typing a quick response, we mutter an apology or gesture that this will only take a second. Sure, we get right back to the conversation at hand; it's just that it's now normal for both parties to accept what has been forfeited.

I have been in small group situations where one person starts looking at their phone, then another does this, and then the rest of the group follows suit. What results is not the peace of companionable silence, a kind of parallel play, but rather the effective dispersal of the gathering—not in body but in spirit, each of us is relating to someone else who's not there. Maybe it is a pressing email that needs to be taken care of, something we had promised to send someone, or an anxiety that cannot be resolved until contact is made. Even though we have essentially dumped each other, this exodus from being present together is not experienced as the loss that it is.

Not long ago, I was stuck at a long stoplight and watched a group of eight people in their thirties moving briskly along the wide avenue's crosswalk. They each held a phone in front of them as they walked. I was astonished to see they weren't talking to each other. Not one person turned to address another. They were four couples, or a mix of friends close in age, out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon. When they reached the other side and continued up a cross street, I saw that the focus remained on their phones. The light changed and I drove on, but this image troubled me all the way home. How can people who are juxtaposed, in motion together, not speak to each other?

Those of us who went through our teen years and young adulthood tethered to landlines had the freedom of disconnection whenever we went outside. We left behind telephone receivers connected with curlicue wires to phones that were connected to walls. Far from the phone, we loved the ones we were with. We played hard at games with palpable participants. Walking, we were side-by-side in talk and laughter, looking around the world together. People not there were not there. When we were out and about, those in our company were in the foreground, the center, while unheard phones were ringing in the buildings around us.

I was delighted beyond reason last month when my 18-year-old granddaughter got so caught up in the story she was recounting that she let her phone buzz and kept on with her intricate narrative. This was bliss—focused attention, the speaker and the listener both enchanted by what was being created together. The story grew. Details were remembered and made fresh in the telling. It took 45 minutes just to get to the part of the story leading up to the first kiss.

There is a famous New Yorker cover drawing in which a family is standing on a beach, their backs to the ocean, and the parents and their two teenage children are all texting, heads down. They are not fully at the beach or really with each other. This image has been held by a magnet on my refrigerator since it appeared in July 2012. It was funny then. Now scenes of this kind are too ordinary to be ironic. This is how we live.

We have become numb to the impact of interruption, the loss of momentum and emotional flow. What occurs in person is so casually diminished that we forget what can happen when a certain consonance of feeling is sustained and allowed to burgeon. We can't recall what it's like to give or receive undivided attention. We are loathe to venture out into a conversation where we might become speechless, where we could be momentarily beyond words, because we aren't able anymore to count on the other person staying with us. A pause or hesitation has become a chance to check our messages.

The cancellation of presence has gone too far. I want to reclaim the felt sense of being together, the immediacy of inhabiting the same space and giving each other mutual prominence. Being present to each other must become valuable again, resuming the highest status as something that must not be forfeited through a false equivalence: a ring or a buzz or a chime.

Copyright: Wendy Lustbader, 2023.