Against the Pathologizers

The term attention whore is unusual in that it is a moronic corruption of ideas filtered down from both Christianity and Freud. Not since the days when sportscasters started "deconstructing" strategies have terms been played with so loosely, and so readily taken as a given.

Case in point.

Even Time and other major press organs have published articles attempting to deflate the 25 Things note from facebook. For the sake of future generations, it was simply this: you listed 25 facts about yourself and asked 25 of your friends to do the same.

What dark impulses lay behind this seemingly casual exercise? A curiousity about our friends? An enjoyment of wit and word play? An attempt to briefly justify ourselves, in brief, to a wide scope of people in a short time. Was it creativity? Self-expression? An attempt to make human connections?

Oh no. Not to the pundits. This little exercise wasn't guided by basic, sound, decent human impulses to communicate and exchange, but at best a fascination with the trivial and at worst, an attempt to raise the very Babylon of Attention Whoredom. Reading these writers (Suddath is the prime offender, although I've been sent others), one could come away conceiving of any damn public activity as an exercise in attention seeking. Melville likely wrote Moby-Dick because he wanted attention. Townes Van Zandt likely wrote "Pancho and Lefty" because he wanted attention. Any non-saint who doesn't meticulously disguise his or her deeds or ideas must be clowning themselves for the sake of a little notice.

Never mind the note only politely invites attention -- those interested must click. Like Moby-Dick unfortunately, the notes are easily ignored.

If the the pragmatic result of all this attention seeking is that we somehow understand each other slightly more, marking the changes and developments and idiosyncracies of each other, all the while being entertained by a small, filtered glimpse into the private life of sometimes half-remembered acquaintances, or perhaps even having a close friend finally spell out their positions and ambitions, then, of course, Derrida's half-wit children will see this as cretinous Peeping Tomism, worse than the dreaded reality tv. They will mark it in terms of pathology, as they do nearly every human impulse.

This is our payback for a cheapened public discourse. When you find it hard to claim to be entertained by a tv show, and must always be "obsessed," when you speak of necessary acts like shopping for food as a compulsion, and when you call a movie that has both tender and dark moments schizophrenic, then you unconsciously feed into a worldview where the chief judge and accountant is Pop Psychology. As one who still enjoys judicious use of American hyperbole, what a nightmare, indeed.