Let’ start with this:
On March 7th 2024, I was asked to introduce, with a 15-minute speech, the Global Citizens Model UN event at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
I spoke from the official stage, reserved for speeches at the United Nations, to an audience of about 2,000 people, mostly young people with professors and delegates from the five continents.
The speech, titled Memorable Times, allowed me to reflect further about the value of attention in the digital age.
This is a topic I consider central at the moment, especially for the new generations, and which I have been developing for several years in a course at USI (the University of Italian Switzerland) in Lugano. In Italy, it has also become a book for Luiss University Press: “Attention and Power.”
Here is the more or less complete text of what I said on that recent occasion.
We are living through memorable times: times of exciting change, yet also times of chaos and fear.
We are concerned for the health of the planet and we feel, in various parts of the globe, geopolitical tensions — reducing the stability of peace.
The moment is extraordinary, indeed, and for this reason, we must better understand the reality around us. If things are changing, it means we are changing. It means we are the actors of this transformation.
There are many other items — more hidden or less visible — that contribute to feeling insecure and uncertain about our future. Perhaps we even have the power to reverse them.
That is what I want to talk about — today.
Can I tell you what worries me a lot, alongside geopolitical current events and climate change?”
It is the feeling that we are letting the past swiftly drift into oblivion. It seems that only today is important. We carry with us fragments of history and memory that are increasingly elusive.
So, we no longer know how to use these fragments — to connect the past to our present.
For too long, we have mistreated our present, making the bridge between past and future, fragile. Caught up in daily activities, we lose sight of what is truly important. This doesn’t help in making the best decisions when needed.
A deep sense of history is important to understand where we are and where we want to go. Instead, we seem (or we are) without a direction, with no strategy at all. This stirs our dreams and our life.
It’s one of the causes of our anxiety.
One of the most significant effects of digital technology now is turning time into an eternal present.
This condition brings with it — a distorted idea.
In the absence of an idea of the future, the eternal present prevents criticism of the present itself. And it doesn’t allow us to unleash our power, the one that enables us to build the future, to face adversities more confidently.
A singular conception of time, by definition, offers no alternatives. It erases the very idea of freedom.
Freedom from the domain of the already known. While knowledge is the tool that moves research and broadens the horizon.
That’s the reason why we study, inform ourselves and discuss with others.
However, to do this, it’s necessary to exit the maze of constant inattention.
We share the Earth with 8 billion of humans. 5 billion are connected to each other by technology:the web, digital devices.
Our tools give us the idea, maybe the illusion, of permanent connection.
By the way, there are about 3 billion human beings — who are disconnected and live through other, more significant exclusions. A substantial part of them are dealing with hunger, poverty, diseases, and wars — widespread or localized.
Even between the remaining 5 billion connected, there are enormous social, cultural and economic differences.
We are connected, perhaps, to a separate reality. We share the largest public square in human history. This is the web. A Babel where many speak and few manage to catch only bits of conversation without the possibility of deepening what they receive.
The digital world we inhabit is part of a noisy family, not always able to provide useful tools for a full understanding of things.
Let’s talk about your generation now! We know that, in mature economies, the population tends to age. We have the feeling that there are always fewer young people around. But this is not the case — if we look at the entire globe. There have never been so many young people in the world as now.
Tomorrow will be on your side — because you are young- and much for you has yet to be built. You are also a multitude. About 2.5 billion. Almost a third of humans!
Therefore, for the future to truly be yours, it’s necessary to refine a couple of qualities that we human naturally possess — but are using less and less.
The first necessary quality is a good quantity of attention. Yes, attention.
I have spent a lot of time analyzing attention in the digital age. It is through attention that we gain the ability to make correct decisions.
Attention also has a significant economic value, which can be of great help to those who intend to produce quality contents in all fields: from art to literature, to media, to communication.
And we all want to write, create, produce — beautiful things.
Some international moguls have an enormous capacity to influence our decisions. Consider the role of the big technological players.
We all use their applications every day.
We have focused on attention because it works as a navigation tool for us. More necessary today, when stimuli and notifications are several and the quality of the information that reaches us is often more difficult to evaluate in terms of quality.
Attention allows us, if correctly used, to recognize and relate to various forms of powers — old and new — that are constantly born and die. Power — once easy to identify — today is more widespread and fluid.
Often, older people, professors, parents, tend to give too much responsibility to our devices — to social media i.e. — for the loss of concentration and difficulty in studying. Yet, the solution is not to avoid using technology- but to know how to use our attention even with digital technologies.
“The quality of our attention changes the world: we are literally involved in creation,” states Iain McGilchrist, one of the most important scholars in the field of neuropsychiatry and philosophy.
McGilchrist has offered a deep and new look at the distinctive functions of the two hemispheres of our brain.
His work explains many things in the relationship between attention and technology.
In his book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere focuses on detailed information processing and logical analysis.
In contrast, the right hemisphere manages symbolic representations and understanding of context.
However, for a full understanding and action, it’s essential that the two hemispheres collaborate -and no one dominating the other.
According to McGilchrist, Western culture has overly stimulated the left hemisphere, reducing our ability to intuit and perceive symbolic aspects and better understand the overall picture of things.
This inclination has contributed to an increasing political polarization and a limited worldview.
The dependence on technology has enlarged this discrepancy. Thus, to resume the conversation and correct collaboration between the two hemispheres of our brain, it’s necessary to reconsider education, culture, and choose a softer approach to technology — not demonize it.
We must value both logic and creativity, — embracing intuition as well as sensitivity.
The quality of our attention is fundamental in this balance. If it tilts too much towards one side, we lose some capabilities, while if it tilts towards the other, we can underestimate other aspects such as clarity and the ability to analyze.
The quality of our attention is more crucial than ever.
Therefore, it is good to monitor the effects that technology has on us, particularly on the loss of attention, because the challenge is there: not to give up our essential abilities, nor to avoid the beneficial effects of technological innovation.
It seems an easy balance to find, but it is not.
Okay! At the beginning, I mentioned two tools that we must learn to use: one is certainly attention. But what is the other?
The other concerns our passions.
Here we do not have a neuroscience of passions. So, I will tell you a brief story about four Italian fellows.
Around the ages of 24/25, they invented a magazine because they could not find anything interesting to read for themselves.
The magazine is a weekly that has been published with great success in Italy since late 1993 and is called Internazionale.
How was the magazine born? The founders decided that the paper suitable for them — must talk about world events and do so in a clear, but also complete way.
Who is able of writing such a paper? No one, of course. So the only possible solution was to choose — from newspapers & magazines around the world — the articles that the editors would have wanted to read, pay a royalty to the publisher of the original articles, and then translate everything into Italian.
So Internazionale was born, from the passion and the need for quality journalism of four boys and girls. The result? An economic disaster and poor sales. After the first six months, the magazine was close to stop publications: almost nothing worked well and debts were accumulating.
I met them at that moment, and we worked hard together to reset the publication. The readers were few, but loyal. If you have loyal readers, you can build whatever you want, and we did it.
However, it’s not so much about how we managed to turn a failure into a victory — this concerns some technical aspects of publishing that today are not valid anymore. The rules have changed so many times over the last years. Today other instruments are needed, but attention and passion are always fundamental.
What is useful to know is the attitude of those young fellows back then. When it was clear that we would make it to stay in the market — and that we were growing very well — they were very happy. But they told me: “Even if we hadn’t made it, it would have been a beautiful adventure and a great experience anyway. And we would have gone on to invent something new again.”
If you pass by the Termini Station in Rome, you will find the editorial office of Internazionale. I worked with them for 25 years — until a few years ago — now every time I pass by, I look at the windows overlooking the square, I smile, and think back to those distant days. I think of all the young people who, over the last 30 years, have gone to work there — or who have passed through and then went on to build their dreams elsewhere.
Imagining, creating, generating — this is what makes us free.
Thank you for your attention