Many things want our attention.  They can’t all have it

Life always seems to get louder and more insistent.  There are reasons for this, though it’s not a good trend.

A few years ago our navigator was assigned to a fairly new ship, not even a year old.  That meant that many things on the bridge were now electronic and digital that had been manual or analog (or missing altogether) when he first went to sea.  In general, that’s good; a computer won’t make a silly mistake out of sheer fatigue when calculating another ship’s course and speed.  But a multiplication of electronic machines also meant a multiplication of alarms.  It took some practice to distinguish between a telephone call from the captain, a warning signal from the engine room and an indication that one of the bulbs in the running lights had burned out.  He never did figure out all the sounds, of which there were dozens.  It didn’t help that the most insistent and frightening one came from the copier, indicating that it had run out of paper.

The multitude of alarms was a result of many tasks being automated, but not completely.  Machines still needed human decisions and human actions.  And, of course, the manufacturers of each one felt that theirs was important and should have prompt attention.

Life in general has produced more and more “alarms”–things trying to get our attention.  And they’ve become more insistent about it.  Ads in the newspapers and magazines grow larger, more colorful, more distracting.  Even some bus stop shelters have motion-picture ads.  And web pages sport moving, dissolving, violently clashing images (even those not advertising the latest action movie).  Color and sudden motion get our attention.

So we have to become desensitized to loud sounds, bright colors, violent motion.  Otherwise we are overwhelmed and disoriented; at the very least, distracted.  (Watch someone who does not watch TV visit a house that keeps one on all the time for background noise.  He or she will have trouble carrying on a coherent conversation!)  It’s a survival trait for the modern world.

But there is a reason that color, noise and motion capture our attention.  They used to mean danger, opportunity, something that we really needed to pay attention to: a threatening animal, not someone trying to sell car insurance.  When we’ve learned to pay no attention to alarms, how will we learn about danger?