Should Anyone Care
I noticed recently that Instagram started surveying users to see whether they had recall or memory of a brand that they may have seen. How many of you, in the various platforms where you consume information, are having trouble recalling? Where did I see the next travel destination or the poignant comment on AI's future? By paying attention to everything, we are paying attention to nothing.
Technology to the rescue? Push notifications and text alerts have all been designed to bring attention to a task: the concert tickets are going on sale, your child is due for an annual exam, oh, an explosion occurred in a remote town in South Africa, and don't forget to send that birthday text to your Mother-in-law. The jury is still out on the sustained impact of these push notifications and text alerts in behavior change. When it comes to medication, some studies have shown improved adherence while others suggest that it has no long-term impact.
Are we solving the attention problem with the right solutions? In the high-stakes environment of inpatient care, especially the ICU, there are alerts and alarms that go off constantly. Often, they are silenced for being too distracting. A friend’s newborn has been in the hospital the last several months. A nurse forgot to turn off the feeds though IV fluids were started before a procedure, resulting in delays and complications. The solution design for these errors due to inattentiveness often misses the objective (more alerts, regulations that feel punitive). All of us that have been in a care setting have felt the cognitive overload from the alerts (EHR, patient portals, pagers, emails, etc). Have any of those design solutions made us better care givers?
The poet Mary Oliver famously said: “Real attention needs empathy; attention without feeling is just a report.” In her world, attention to ourselves and the world around us is the ultimate act of care. Paying attention is the act of experiencing the world and others with all the senses that makes us more intuitively human. In that spirit, as we expend our attention, are we losing the ability to care for ourselves and others?
In this current compressed AI advancement, more will compete for our attention: data and information at a velocity than we can ever imagine. It will be up to us how we make sense of it all, how we practice our sensing, and how we care.