What we slow down for

A minor crash on a Dubai road will slow both directions for kilometres. The lane on the far side is clear, nothing is blocking it, and still every car eases off to look.

A little further on, a crew is putting up a new footbridge. Steel going into place, a crane swinging slowly, people doing careful work at height. Nobody slows down for that.

Our feeds work the same way. The public argument, the celebrity coming apart, the shop owner losing his temper on camera: these get watched, shared and watched again. The person patiently building something useful, a school, a clinic, a small business that treats its people well, gets a polite glance at best.

This is not a mystery. Conflict is easy to watch and asks nothing of us. And because it gets watched, it gets made. The people who make things for our screens are not cynical so much as attentive. They give us what we stop for.

Which means the stopping is a choice, and a bigger one than it looks. What we watch, share and reward becomes the thing there is more of next year. Spend an evening following someone who is building, and better still, help them a little, and the flow shifts by a fraction.

It is tempting to believe the culture is fixed and that anyone who wants attention has no option but to feed it a quarrel. But the culture keeps moving, and it moves in the direction we look.

The crash will be cleared by morning. The bridge will still be there in thirty years. It is worth deciding which one gets the glance.