{"id":14865,"date":"2020-11-05T15:15:06","date_gmt":"2020-11-05T14:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/?p=14865"},"modified":"2023-08-07T13:23:21","modified_gmt":"2023-08-07T11:23:21","slug":"its-like-you-disappear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitionandculture.local\/blogs\/inge-van-de-ven\/its-like-you-disappear\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s like you disappear\u2019 – Fleabag\u2019s Attentional Conflicts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In his book Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age<\/em> that has been extensively discussed on these pages<\/a>, Alberto Acerbi asks how the diffusion of digital media might influence the dissemination and success of cultural traits, and how this in turn affects cultural transmission. The quality and modes of human attention might be considered a case in point. How we allocate attention, and what modes of attention we have at our disposal, are under transformation under the influence of changes in the media we use, and this in turn is reflected by cultural objects. In this blog, distraction-conflict theory helps explain how an acclaimed television series dramatizes attentional conflict and probes the implications of a contemporary phenomenon that many of us are afflicted by: being constantly suspended between two places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adapted to the screen from Phoebe Waller-Bridges\u2019 one-woman-play Touch<\/em>, the BBC series Fleabag<\/em> has become a huge success. Its first season won a 2017 BAFTA; season two received six Emmy\u2019s for comedy acting and writing (11 nominations). The main character, played by Waller-Bridge, is a Londoner in her early thirties who struggles to give her life meaning.Fleabag\u2019s<\/em> most discussed feature is its innovative use of audience address or breaking the fourth wall. We are deeply familiar with this confessional mode from reality TV, where participants are often interviewed to retrospectively narrate or comment upon the action in a room where they are seemingly all by themselves and talk directly to the camera (think of Big Brother<\/em>\u2019s \u2018diary rooms\u2019). Direct address can distance us from the fiction, generating effects of defamiliarization or Brechtian alienation, \u2018exposing the technology\u2019 to shock the audience out of immersion in the diegesis and alerting them to its constructed nature. But it can also immerse and engage the viewer. Fleabag<\/em> dusts off the device and makes it new again\u2014by gradually revealing the nature of the relation between character and audience to be different from what we at first might assume.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The protagonist\u2019s frequent narrative asides and conspiratorial glances at the camera establish an intimate relation with the viewer<\/a>. In interviews, Waller-Bridge calls the device her \u2018secret camera friend<\/a>\u2019. Fleabag constantly annotates her life for us, making snarky remarks about her family members, giving us a live report during sex. She confides in us where she doesn\u2019t take the other characters seriously, like when her boyfriend Harry breaks up with her and assures her he won\u2019t be back (\u2018He will be back\u2019), or when the priest tells her they won\u2019t be having sex (\u2018We\u2019ll last a week\u2019 ). We become her co-conspirators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not a \u2018mental health comedy\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much has been made of the meaning of Fleabag\u2019s<\/em> audience address. Some read the device as introspection, arguing that \u2018Fleabag\u2019s\u00a0you\u00a0<\/em>is actually herself\u2019 (Wong, 2019) or compare the fourth-wall-breaking habit to prayer<\/a>. Others associate her \u2018compulsive self-narration\u2019 with dissociation or call the series a \u2018mental health comedy<\/a>\u2019. The poor fictional woman has been diagnosed with all sorts of things from Borderline Personality Disorder with traits of narcissism and Antisocial Personality Disorder (di Betta 2020) to PTSD (Landau 2018). Such readings that pathologize the protagonist (\u2018Her pathology is our pleasure<\/a>\u2019) miss the mark, by implying a clear boundary between the \u2018pathological\u2019 character and the supposedly \u2018normal\u2019 viewer, who is unproblematically entertained. Countering these \u2018mental health\u2019 readings, I read the main character\u2019s habits as habitual acts of \u2018checking out\u2019 akin to checking your phone when engaged in conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Distraction-conflict theory (Baron 1986), the presence of others can distract us from tasks we are engaged with. This can lead to attentional conflicts, meaning we are at a loss regarding how to allocate attention in case of mutually exclusive inputs asking for a response. Such a conflict can cause a cognitive overload that produces arousal, to which we may respond by activating and relying on heuristics and schemata to guide our perceptions and social judgments.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u2018Phubbing\u2019 as a coping mechanism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has consequences for how we construct sociality. Studies of Smartphone use during co-present social interaction show that phubbing (from \u2018phone\u2019 and \u2018snubbing\u2019) diminishes the experienced quality of conversation and by extent the relationship, as our attention is only half directed at the other, and half at WhatsApp messages or social media feeds (Vanden Abeele et al. 2019). The phone user enters a state of \u2018absent presence\u2019 (Gergen 2002), being physically present, but mentally absent. Feelings of affiliation and intimacy increase when conversation partners display signs of attentiveness. Distraction may keep conversation partners from self-disclosure, which is needed to develop trusting, intimate relationships. One leg in the actual and one in the virtual, a large number of people spend a significant portion of their day \u2018alone together\u2019 (Turkle 2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fleabag uses technology and performance to distract herself and her audience in a way that is similar to activities on social media. She is annotating her life continuously, commenting on what she is doing in real time (\u2018jogging\u2019). Fleabag engages in a form of live streaming, the ongoing broadcasting and documenting of one\u2019s daily life and thoughts, including the mundane and intimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more she connects with her \u2018secret camera friend\u2019, the further she disconnects from the people in her life. Focusing on \u2018us,\u2019 she doesn\u2019t have to deal with her immediate reality. The moment she turns to us, the other characters become blurry: a literal manifestation of her cognitive act of losing focus on the people she is interacting with and retreating in her own private disclosures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point, she reveals her awareness of the audience as a presence within the diegesis: \u2018I have friends….,\u2019 she says to her therapist, with a wink to the camera, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re\u2026 they\u2019re always there.\u2019 It is like she admits that these asides are her way of coping with loneliness. It becomes progressively clear that Fleabag uses \u2018us\u2019 to distract herself, to deflect painful moments, and to keep boredom at bay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fleabag<\/em> dramatizes habitual acts of checking out that has become such a big part of how many of us attend to the world, with one (mental) eye glued to a screen. Every time she checks in with her audience, she is effectively \u2018phubbing\u2019 the people in her life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cognitive shortcuts<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Distraction-conflicts tax our attentional capacity, which leads to cognitive shortcuts. These lead to social behaviors aimed at destabilizing cognitive economy, such as careless encoding of events, the use of heuristics when attributing causality evaluations, and relying on stereotypes and social schemata instead of actual markers in person perception (Baron 1986). Like Fleabag herself, most of the supporting characters remain nameless and are indicated by flattering nicknames like \u2018Bus Rodent,\u2019 \u2018Hot Misogynist or \u2018Arsehole Guy\u2019. We see them through her eyes, reduced to stereotypes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As her audience, we are not let off the hook: we are complicit. Not only do we enable her in her coping strategies, we use her misadventures as our own distraction. After all, fiction is itself a distraction. As Alice Bennett writes in Contemporary<\/em> Fictions of Attention<\/em>, \u201cthe play of attention and distraction is part of the structure of narrative itself\u201d (2018, 174). In this case, breaking the fourth wall is a powerful way to direct and modulate audience attention. How many of us have not at least on occasion \u2018phubbed\u2019 a film or TV-series, to the chagrin of the people we are watching with? Yet both the show and the character are hardly \u2018phubbable\u2019: they don\u2019t let us get away with dispersed attention, due to Waller-Bridge\u2019s attention-grabbing \u2018performative shamelessness\u2019 (Dobson 2015), the fast-paced editing, and the frequent and snappy asides and meaningful looks that we could miss by blinking, let alone texting. Fleabag is the center of attention and our main distraction, and while she is allowed to tune out, we aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n

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When in season two her love interest, the Hot Priest, catches her in the middle of a quick aside to us, he asks \u2018What was that?\u2019 and points in the direction of the camera. \u2018That thing you\u2019re doing? It\u2019s like you disappear.\u2019 Panicked, she looks at the viewer once again. \u2018There!\u2019 he says. \u2018Where did you just go?\u2019 \u2018Nowhere,\u2019 she tells him, but turns to the camera with a look of alarm: we have been caught. By the end of the second season, after she has established a real connection with the Priest, it is suggested she might have grown out of her coping mechanism of distracting herself with her virtual audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That which grabs our attention has obvious psychological appeal, and it must have its advantages if, with Acerbi, we presume a \u2018good design<\/a>\u2019 behind cultural changes. In the digital age, attentional conflict has become an integral part of our lives. While William James (1890) still famously described attention in opposition to distraction (Zerstreutheit<\/em>) as a focused concentration of consciousness, theorists of modernity like Benjamin (1935), Kracauer (1924), and Simmel (1971), each in their own way tried to make sense of the role of distraction as formative for modern subjectivity (Van Alphen 2017). Extending their arguments to the digital information age, Kristin Veel (2011) argues that we have now entered a stage in which the ability to focus on more than one thing simultaneously has become so habitual that distraction might be regarded as a prerequisite for concentration. Could we consider such a shift in cognition as another example of cultural evolution?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, this series confronts us with the ways in which we (barely) attend to others surrounding us, but also to the media that we use to distract ourselves. This is not \u2018just\u2019 a feminist issue, a predicament of the millennial generation, a mental health issue, or a God-shaped hole in our culture. Norms and expectations of what it means to attend to something or someone are under transformation, and Fleabag<\/em> invites us to notice and reflect on these ongoing changes.<\/p>\n\n\n

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References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acerbi, A. 2020. Cultural Evolution in the Digital Age<\/em>. Oxford UP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alphen, E. van. 2017. Attention for Distraction: Modernity, Modernism, and Perception. Text Matters<\/em>, 7<\/em>(7). 88-97.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baron, R. S. 1986. Distraction-Conflict Theory: Progress and Problems. In L. Advances in experimental social psychology vol. 19, edited by Berkowitz, 1 \u2013 40. New York, NY: Academic Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin, W. 1999. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936. Illuminations<\/em> (H. Arendt, Ed.; H. Zorn, Trans). Pimlico, 211-44.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bennett, A. 2018. Contemporary Fictions of Attention, Reading and Distraction in the Twenty-First Century<\/em>. Bloomsbury Academic. Ebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Di Betta, P. 2020. Fleabag\u2019s Ethical Investigations<\/em>. Amazon Kindle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dobson, A. S. 2015. Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-Representation<\/em>. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gergen, K. J. 2002. \u201cThe challenge of absent presence.\u201d In Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance<\/em>, edited by J. E. Katz, and M. A. Aakhus, 227 \u2013 241. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology<\/em>, vol. 1. Henry Holt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kracauer, S. 1963. Cult of Distraction. \u00dcber die Berliner Lichtspielh\u00e4user. Das Ornament der Masse. <\/em>Essays. <\/em>Suhrkamp, 311\u2013317.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Landau, N. 2018. TV Writing on Demand: Creating Great Content in the Digital Era<\/em>. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simmel, G. 1971. The Metropolis and Mental Life. On Individuality and So\u00adcial Forms: Selected Writings<\/em> (D. N. Levine, Ed.). The University of Chicago Press. 324\u201339.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turkle, S. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.<\/em> New York, NY: Basic Books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vanden Abeele, M. M. P., Hendrickson, A. T., Pollmann, M. M. H., and Ling, R. 2019. Phubbing behavior in conversations and its relation to perceived conversation intimacy and distraction: An exploratory observation study. Computers in Human Behavior <\/em>100, 35 \u2013 47.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Veel, K. 2011. Information Overload and Database Aesthetics. Comparative Critical Studies, 8<\/em>(2-3), 307-19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wong, D. (2019). Distancing Affect in Fleabag.\u00a0Alluvium<\/em>,\u00a07<\/em>(5).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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