To Change the World, Shut Out the World
Many of my older students take one look at the commotion on Twitter and don’t know what to think.
I tell them to think of a bar at happy hour and the powerful human ability to focus on one conversation despite the noise. Scientists have actually studied just how we do this miraculous bit of auditory editing to improve how we build hearing aids.
Reading every disjointed sentence that speeds by on Twitter wouldn’t just be confusing; it’s impossible. Humanity uses Twitter at 350,000 tweets per minute as of 2013 and that statistic has only risen in the years since.
It’s hard to visualize all that written talk, never mind understand it.
Yet managing it is really no different than finding a way to converse at your favorite nightclub or restaurant. You just have to focus. Which is why Twitter breaks each of us down by demographics the moment we sign up. It asks us where we each live and what we buy, whom we want to follow and what we like to do because it’s building our seats at the bar.
It’s creating our ability to make sense of the world and enter the conversation.
The focus in your eardrum is the same as Twitter’s breakdown of your likes—both are a form of search engine. Just as you fill in the Google search bar to navigate the Web, you can only get through life by paying attention.
Last week, I wrote about how focus is frightening because it carries a certain responsibility. When you decide to write your book or make your film about a criminal or natural catastrophe, you commit a part of your life to that subject. It can seem limiting to spend your days on something so specific and random.
This shouldn’t scare you; rather, it should encourage you. You have to devote your attention somewhere. The more focused you become, the more successful you are likely to be.
The Internet tries relentlessly to invest us in all of the world’s troubles. We can’t grieve every loss around the world or lead the revolution for every cause we might wish to change. We only have so many tears and one vote if we’re lucky. You may get to change one thing about the world—one aspect—if you focus your whole life on that effort. Everything else you dislike will likely be there when your time is up.
In 1865, it took London 12 days to hear about President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in the United States. In 1883, it took Boston 4 hours to hear about Krakatoa’s eruption in Indonesia. Called the first global event, Krakatoa was just the right catastrophe at the right time—except for everyone around Krakatoa.
It’s @location coincided with the @location of the birth of the telegraph cable.
Before that serendipitous misfortune, most people on Earth never heard about a tragedy in the next town, never mind one on the other side of the world.
To shut the violence and the chaos of the world out as you go about your day tomorrow is not privilege; it’s just sanity.
It’s also the only way you can, if you really want, to change the world for the better.