Dear Tech. We want our attention back.
This week the Glimpse collective came together in London to start work on our next major project: Attention and the Human Experience.
We’re looking at the role attention plays in mental health, and specifically how we might help people take back control of their attention and improve their experience of life.
The mental health of young people in particular is deteriorating at an alarming rate. There has been a sharp increase in ADHD, anxiety, and self-harm. Younger people are consistently struggling to get enough sleep — checking their phones in the middle of the night in case they are being talked about online, finding social relationships more difficult, and feeling anxious about their status as ‘influencers’ .
Glimpse is all about coming up with ideas which help people look beyond the problem and imagine a world where it’s been fixed or radically improved. So we’re going to spend the next few weeks thinking of ways to help people get their attention back — to create and celebrate moments of connection, wonder and focus, with or without technology.
This is an open creative process, and we have over 150 people taking part. You can join the group and download our creative brief here.
At the launch event we heard from technologists, artists, psychotherapists and 16 year olds, all of whom share a belief in the value of attention as a valuable and finite ‘human resource’.
Louis Weinstock is the co-founder of BounceWorks, a social enterprise that seeks to improve young people’e mental health through technology. He told us:
“If we want to really understand the dark shadow of technological progress, we should look at young people’s minds.
The problem is the ‘slot-machine psychology’ used by certain tech companies, who are hijacking the dopamine systems of our future generations, changing their brain structures in ways we can barely predict. Younger people show many traits comparable to victims of extreme trauma — a decline in empathy, hypervigilance, increased impulsivity and inattention.
“We have to take a stand and protect young minds. At Bounce Works, we are taking this stand alongside young people, meeting them where they are at, co-designing, leveraging digital technology to encourage critical thinking, empowered choices about attention, and real human connection.”
We also heard from Elsa, a 16 year old from London who kindly gave up her evening in the middle of GCSEs to explain what it’s like, well, being 16 at the moment.
She explained how there was simply no choice: if you decided not to use social media for an evening you’d be totally left out of the conversation, embarrassed and isolated within your social group. A crucial text, meme or thread could be shared at 10 or 11pm which would shape the next day’s conversation. You snooze, you lose.
What struck me about Elsa’s description was the sheer relentlessness of it, the impossibility of ever switching off for even a short while. This is surely the ‘hypervigilance’ that Louis is talking about, a state of nervous tension from which you’re never given the chance to recover. It feels really patronising to express sympathy in this situation, but I can’t help feeling desperately sorry for teenagers who are put under such pressure with no way out.
We then heard from Chris Jack, a PHD scientist who explained the benefits of ‘mind wandering’:
“Mind wandering (or internally-directed thought, or simply day-dreaming), is synonymous with the so-called ‘default mode’ of the human brain, i.e. what the brain spontaneously does when we’re not paying attention. It is a crucial part of the human experience and a force for creativity and self-development.
Is wrestling back control of our attention actually more about providing nurturing space for mind wandering?”
This is a fascinating insight: perhaps one way of ‘taking our attention back’ is to find time for daydreaming, being bored, or doing nothing much. One of the ways we can reach these states are through meditation and mindfulness — which seems like a key area for this creative process.
Next up, Joel Gethin Lewis told us about how artists are pushing back against the attention economy, sharing a series of examples including:
- The Artvertiser, set of goggles that replace advertising with art in real time.
- CVDazzle, a set of makeup tutorials for beautifully beating face detection algorithms.
- The Transparency Grenade, a silver smithed grenade that can be tossed into any building to start surveilling automatically.
Finally we heard from Sharmin Ahammad, a digital marketer who created an online course for those who want to reclaim their attention called Digital Cooldown. She made a strong case not just for using less technology, but for thinking first about what kind of people we want to be:
“We need to stop conflating human values with commercial ones, and think deeply about our own.
Know what you want to pay attention to, self-experiment with gusto, and embrace the vulnerability of life beyond a screen (even for just a short while).
And turn off all notifications on your phone, ok?”
When we reach the end of our days, the our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to. This might seem an obvious thing to say, but our attention defines us. It is our consciousness, our sense of being in the world.
In 2018, most of us spend around four hours per day (or 24 hours per week) looking at our phones. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Email, BBC News, whatever. For younger people the amount can be significantly higher.
In the robot nursing homes of 2080, I wonder how we will reflect on this use of our time. Perhaps we will feel regret or resignation. But my guess is there will also be anger. Because by then it will be common knowledge that this wasn’t entirely our own choice: that we had been deliberately hacked.
Things like notifications, badges, and dopamine loops are used deliberately to sell our attention to advertising companies. When we do ‘look up’ from our phones we are bombarded with physical ads — the average Londoner is said to be subjected to 5000 commercial messages each day.
In this way, the early part of the 21st century may come to be seen as a kind of wild west of human consciousness, where whole populations were at the mercy of ruthless bandits with powerful algorithms who could make money from our weaknesses.
But in another sense, I wonder if this may actually be the wakeup call we need. Because if we want to start fixing some of the great problems of our time — from climate change to consumerism, loneliness or lack of meaning— we need to start noticing what’s happening. We need to pay attention, not just to the ugliness of it all but to the beauty that exists all around us.
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.”
Albert Einstein
I campaigned for action on climate change for nearly ten years, and came to believe that we need a step change in human consciousness, a new relationship with nature which is attentive, respectful and rooted in gratitude. If we can ‘wake up’ and recognise the incredible abundance that surrounds us, we might be able to find happiness with what we have, rather than seeking endless growth at all costs.
It might seem that the ‘attention merchants’ are winning at the moment, and that we’re less connected with nature (or each other) than ever before. But I sense a growing awareness that this state of constant distraction is bad for us, and that there maybe something on the other side of it which is more enjoyable, more fulfilling, more true to our humanity.
New trends like the rise of meditation, the conscious food movement and the pursuit of spiritual activism all point towards a desire to notice more keenly, to attend to the world around us in a new and radical ways.
We don’t yet know where this project will lead. But we are looking forward to seeing what ideas emerge when people apply themselves to this enormous challenge with creativity, humour and, yes, focused attention.
You can join the Glimpse project and download the creative brief here.
