High Fidelity Attention = Freedom

When I read Wired Magazine or a book about the internet, I often poke fun at the fact that I’m reading a paper version of these modern concepts. It’s anachronistic, but I find myself less distracted when I read them than when I’m online. Coincidentally, I learned why this is so while reading Kevin Maney’s book, Trade-Off.

Basically Maney says that there is a trade off-with successful products- whether they’re computers, cell phones, books, jewelry, coffee shops, etc.- in that their companies tend to aim for either high fidelity or high convenience, and if they aim both with a product, they’ll succeed at neither and fail.

If I were to apply this concept to attention theory, I suggest that to a company high fidelity is a “pull” concept; build it and they will come. The consumer pushes toward the higher quality they seek. As Maney says about fidelity, it’s something the consumer loves.

Conversely, to a company, convenience is “push.” Make the product ubiquitous and cheap. Get it out there in people’s faces. The consumer doesn’t love you, but they need the cheap prices and convenience.

Fidelity would be what we actually choose to pay attention to. Convenience would be what you have to pay attention to or makes you pay attention.

And how this applies to my continued desire to read books, Kevin Maney says in Trade-Off:

p. 196 “Competition is intense for people’s attention, and book reading- or brain channeling- requires enormous amounts of attention compared with other media such as movies, video games, magazines, websites, live events, and TV shows.”

In other words, books are no longer needed, but loved. People push toward them. We could weigh the attention needed to process what is being read as being higher fidelity. High fidelity attention. There is more to it, but I’d digress.

On the other hand, music playing on a popular radio station takes little attention. And it’s everywhere. Walking into a store, getting in a friend’s car, watching a baseball game, gardening, working out. It’s convenient music. Attention by convenience, more of a secondary sort of attention where you can multi-task. For example, you can listen while reading or driving.

In a way, high fidelity stands out as intended attention. Convenience is paying unavoidable or unintended attention. And, isn’t that a form of freedom- being able to pay attention to what you want, to pay high fidelity attention?

David Foster Wallace from This is Water:

p. 120 “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

If only I could find high fidelity attention driving So Cal freeways.

DFW, rest in peace.