Your attention, please.
“Attention is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those ‘functions’ would be carried out, and in which those ‘things’ would exist. Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world.”
This quote from Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World caught my, um…well, my attention. It’s so true as to be obvious, and yet so easy to forget as to be profound.
The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to.
Think about this sentence every morning for a few days and it proves itself. To go through the day noticing — and even choosing — that which you notice is to move from the cabin to the cockpit as you fly through life.
And yet, much of our economy is built on the notion that our attention can be manipulated, captured, and sold by increasingly intricate, insatiable, technological machinery. We may not always be flying as free as it feels.
Our educational paradigms and practices are both a cause of and a potential solution to the many modern issues of the integrity of our attention.
The attention landscape
Young people today are subject to an attention landscape that no brains — and certainly no young brains — were built to handle. One of the modern digital attention economy’s early-beneficiaries-turned-sharpest-critics, Bo Burnham, nailed it in Welcome to the Internet:
Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time?
Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime,
Anything and everything all of the time.
Like so much else in our world, we know enough to deeply trouble us, but seemingly not enough to rebel or reject (see: the role of dissonance minimization in my ethical alignment framework). We know Netflix’s sees its primary competitor as sleep, TikTok algorithms quickly bombard teenage girls with self-harm images that make them need the platform more, and Facebook’s business model is echo-chamber spirals descending into violence, extremism, and hate speech — whatever will keep us around.
Even when we are not subject to the most sinister impacts of these attention algorithms, we are part of incessant and powerful preference manipulation machines that drive what we think we want towards what a platform can most quickly satisfy.
This outsourcing of our decisions about what matters to us — to companies whose only interest is short-term profit — is the precise opposite of the work I called for in my essay on valueception, the ability to perceive what is of the utmost value. We need to create much more ethical, robust, and democratic infrastructures for this project of communal value-seeking and attention-direction.
Thankfully most young people spend eight hours a day for most of the year deprived of their access to their most convenient portals to all this insidious machinery. But is the attention landscape students experience during a day at school preparing them to for this essential work of community value discernment and creation?
Paying Attention to Education
Education as practiced within the pervasive modern industrial model involves two primary acts of directing students’ attention:
- The relational direction of attention towards the teacher as authority, and as the exclusive source of knowledge.
- The direction of students’ attention towards a specific subject and topic at a specific time.
In combination, these create a bleak attentional experience for minds built to be curious, dynamic, and in relationship. They are instead told what to focus on, when, for how long, and in what way.
The companies profiting off the attention capture economy seemingly couldn’t have designed it any better themselves! After hours of the boredom, apathy, and exhaustion that result from one’s attention constantly being demanded and redirected, kids head straight to a platform that feeds them exactly what they want, exactly when they want it.
This nightly, hours-long pilgrimage to a hellscape of sensory overload and emotional stimulation shortens kids’ attention spans and disrupts their sleep, setting them up for an even worse educational experience the next day at school, which in turn provides an even more cathartic return to the illusion of attentional freedom the night after. So it goes.
(Huh…the most powerful corporations have a massive incentive to keep kids bored by learning irrelevant information in regimented and oppressive forms of schooling?)
Attention needed
I do not know exactly what to do about this, but I do have some questions I plan to start paying closer attention to, and hope the world of education — and beyond — does too. Perhaps simply wondering is the first step we need; after all, the kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to.
- How can we give students more control of their attention and interests in school?
- What role can teachers play for students once we are freed from being primarily a distributor of knowledge?
- What does research tell us about how we can train students to be responsible and healthy consumers of digital content?
- What role do and should parents play in regulating kids’ technology usage?
- How can we continue to push regulation that limits the control companies have over kids’ attention?
- How will increasingly powerful A.I. systems be used either to further degrade or to nurture our capacity and freedom to direct our own attention?
- What in-real-life spaces and communities can we create for kids as an alternative to commercialized digital socialization?
Works pseudo-cited: Much of my interest in these topics comes from the work of The Center for Humane Technology, Zak Stein, Alison Gopnik, and Rick Weissbourd, among many others.
