With a couple of hours to spare when I arrived at the “world’s busiest airport”, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International, I headed through security and down to take the tram the nearly 3/4ths of a mile to my concourse when a surprise realization hit me that had to do with attention in the airport and attention to social media.

It turned out to be my good fortune that the tram was stuck temporarily and people stopped waiting and began to walk…by the hundreds…and so did I. As I moved down the aisle between the moving walkways I came upon some of the most spectacular stone sculpture I’ve ever seen.

Created by artists from the African nation of Zimbabwe, it was, at times, emotional to view them. An example is the photo of one you see at the lower left which is representative of dying-of-AIDS parents with the symbolic child clinging to them. If you’re aware of the horrific HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and the millions of orphans being left behind, you couldn’t look at this sculpture without feeling its power and how evocative it is of the crisis…and think of those little spirits left behind and alone.

What I understood but still found curious, is that of the hundreds of people moving past these sculptures roughly six of us took any time to view them and most paid no attention (of course, people had flights to catch and were in a hurry but I had the time to wander).

Since I’d just completed a talk that morning on social media for all of the business unit leaders of a large private corporation’s strategic conference — a talk where attention, continuous partial attention, and the participation culture were key themes — my observation of people not having the time nor interest in paying attention to sculpture so atypical, hard to ignore, emotionally moving and just plain gorgeous, caused me to ponder the parallels as I continued moving toward my gate.

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