Surely even the most tech-friendly among us rue the effect that screens, like the one you're gazing at right now, have on our ability to focus. With apps and notifications constantly beckoning you to click this, no this, no this, with entire industries organized around capturing — and monetizing — your attention, it's sometimes hard to imagine an alternative to the multitasking distraction that has become so common. |
But not everyone is so resigned. "Around the world, informal coalitions of educators, activists and artists are conducting grass-roots experiments," write D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt in a recent guest essay, to fight back against this "dishonest expropriation of value from you and me and, most visibly of all, our children." |
Graham, Loh and Schmidt are members of one such coalition, called the Friends of Attention. The group emerged from a symposium at the 2018 São Paulo Biennial that was supposed to be about art but, Graham told me, "ended up becoming this super-intense conversation about attention and politics, about civic fragmentation and Cambridge Analytica and the pernicious effects of new 'big data' attentional regimes. We had folks there from Poland and Turkey and Hungary and the U.K. and, of course, the U.S. And there was a sense of mounting concern around these dynamics. A bunch of us threw our hats in the ring, and said, 'Let's try to do something here!'" |
In their essay, the three authors now invite the rest of us to join the revolution against what they memorably call attention-fracking: "pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market." |
The solution starts, they say, in school. "We must flip the script on teachers' perennial complaint," they write. "Instead of fretting that students' flagging attention doesn't serve education, we must make attention itself the thing being taught." |
At the moment, their revolution might seem like a long shot. But Burnett believes that within 15 or 30 years, what you might call attentional fitness will undergo the same kind of transformation that physical fitness did over the past half-century — from a hobbyists' pursuit to a standard part of many people's day. "Folks will look back on our era the way we look back on the health culture of our grandparents," he told me last week, while gearing up for a multigenerational Thanksgiving. "Mine were eating marshmallow salads with pork and egg, and having heart attacks at 40. Their idea of exercise was driving a Winnebago. That world changed! We are going to change again." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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