Your Attention is More Than a Resource to Extract

Photo by Dion Beetson on Unsplash

I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT ATTENTION a lot lately. Perhaps you have, too? It seems like everyone everywhere is always talking about our attention these days: how it’s being diluted by our constant exposure to screens, how no one can focus, how engagement farmers are using us like we’re the soil to till, how this attention crisis is fueling the new moral panic over social media.

I’ve been reading a couple of books that have pressed this concern more to the forefront of my mind. One of them is Chris Hayes’ new book The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. The other is a book that I’m reading with a group of other faculty at my college: James Lang’s 2020 Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It.

These are very different books, but they are both fundamentally about attention. As I’ve been reading them, I’ve had this overwhelming sense that the conversations we’re having about attention in this moment are framed in economic terms. This framing is obvious in the subtitle of Hayes’s book: it’s an endangered resource, one that we’re depleting. But it’s also subtly there in Lang’s book, which is all about how we professors might convince our students to pay attention. It’s as if we want them to make an economic choice about how to use their own scarce resources and we—the professors—want that attention paid out to us.

This sort of framing is happening for good reasons, of course. There is an attention economy—one oriented around the capture and extraction of our attention. Our attention is being mined, to capture our money and our data. This is all very real, and very terrible. And I don’t mean to minimize this at all, I really don’t. This is an important thing to talk about, and to resist.

But I’m also finding that I can’t think about attention this way—at least not exclusively. One of the things I dislike about this framing, especially as a teacher, is that I don’t feel like it does enough justice to the powers that we have over, and in, our attention. Or what can happen when we, in community, bring our powers of attention together and use them collectively.

I KNOW THAT there is a way of thinking about teaching as a form of competitive resource extraction. We try to do what we can to minimize outside interruptions in our classroom space (we ban screens, for instance). And we do our best to extract whatever attention students are willing to pay, so that we can offer them the economic reward of learning something. I know that this sort attention capture can be important. I turn up the volume on my energy, humor, and eccentricity in class because I’ve realized that this captures some attention. I write things on the board because it gives them something to look at. I could go on, but I won’t. My point is simply that I’m not “above” this game of competitive resource extraction. But I also think that, if we reduce our experience in the classroom to a form of competition with social media or games or online shopping, we are truly lost.

When I think about the moments in a classroom when something is really working, when all of us (me and the students) are all engaged in a conversation that seems to really matter, there’s something going on that exceeds this economic framework of resource extraction. It’s not that we, in these moments, are simply paying attention. More, it seems to me, we (teachers and students) are exercising it, using it, bringing it to bear, sharing it. It’s a kind of magic, really.

Teaching isn’t just about lifting something up and getting people to pay attention to it. It’s not just about convincing students to clock in and download our content. Rather, we’re trying to help them understand how to shape and reshape their attention. We give them cultural objects and relics that are strange and unfamiliar (books, ideas, microscopes) and we try to teach them to shape their attention around these things so that they can use these objects well. This isn’t just about paying in and cashing out. It’s a whole other mode of contact and form of engagement.

IT MAY BE TRUE that we are being ruthlessly mined for our attention. But if the framework of resource extraction comes to dominate the way that we talk about attention, I think we will lose our sense that our attention has the real power to do things. And I think that we need that power, perhaps now more than ever.

I actually think that Chris Hayes sees this, and (although not in so many words) acknowledges this in his book. One of the ideas I really appreciate, that he continuously brings up, is that attention is a basic ingredient of care. Attention is the difference for us—especially when we are small children—between life and death. It’s a point that emphasizes the elemental nature of our social connections—how they are as crucial to our survival as food and sleep. But Hayes is also a TV guy, and he describes himself as an attention professional. At the end of the day, the economic framework is the one that he always comes back to. And it’s the one that the book publishers probably pushed him to emphasize. But I’d like to see us start another set of conversations. How about you?