Forty people on the coach

Think of a guide in AlUla with forty people on the coach.

She can speak to all of them through the microphone. She can get them all off at the right stop and back on at the right time. But by the end of the day, she has had real conversations with perhaps five. The couple who asked about the inscriptions. The boy who would not stop asking questions. The older man who walked slowly and wanted to talk about his own town.

The other thirty-five had a good day. They were just not part of the conversation.

This is not a failing of the guide. It is how people are built. We can be heard by a crowd, but we can only pay attention to a handful.

The tools for reach keep getting better. One person with a phone can be seen by more people in an afternoon than a shopkeeper once met in a lifetime. A seller can send the same message to everyone who ever bought from her. The numbers grow and grow.

But the part of us that notices, that remembers names, that understands what someone actually meant, has not grown at all.

So a seller with a large audience still has a small circle she truly knows. The person running a page with a crowd watching still really talks with a few dozen who write back. Everyone else sees the work. They do not get the attention.

Plenty of people try to pretend otherwise and spread themselves across everyone. The result is attention so thin that nobody feels it.

The amplifier is wonderful. It does not change the size of the person holding it.