Tag: attention economy

  • the distraction economy

    the distraction economy

    In this series, I am getting curious about attention. Why can it be so hard to pay attention to the things we want to pay attention to? And why do we give so much attention to things we’d rather not? My interest in this topic originates with adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy principle, “what you pay attention to grows”. I wrote more about that in part one. In part two, I argued for the importance of attending to our passionate interests. This piece is all about that nemesis of attention: distraction.

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    Spend more time reading books.

    This was one of the intentions I set for myself at the start of this year. It doesn’t sound like it should be hard. Even reading those five words, I feel joy and spaciousness. I love sinking deeply into thoughtfully written words – to learn, to imagine, to delight, to rest. In other words, I love books. Always have. Yet, every year it feels like I spend less time reading them. As a kid and teenager, I spent hours at a time engrossed in a book. Now, I rarely read a book uninterrupted for more than 30 minutes at a time – and not as often as I would like to.

    It’s now May and there has been a slight increase in my book-reading time, but not enough to suggest a significant change. It’s the usual story with familiar culprits: my smartphone, my laptop, the Internet. Almost every time I reach for my phone, even if I just meant to check the weather, I’m still there 15 minutes later, trying to remember why I picked it up in the first place. And despite repeatedly setting rules for myself about not bringing my phone into my bedroom, half the time I’m still there scrolling late in the evening – a time that used to be reserved for books only.

    Why has it become so hard to attend to a practice that I love – a practice that feels essential to my learning, emotional regulation and connection to the world?

    it’s capitalism, duh

    Many have researched the impact the attention economy has on our ability to focus. I don’t have anything new to say about it, so I’ll return here to a book that is truly dear to me: Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Here is Odell’s definition of distraction:

    To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one’s attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. (p. 81, my emphasis)

    I love Odell’s invocation of a disassembled mind, as it feels so resonant with my everyday experience and absorption online. These days, I regularly find myself reaching for the phrase I can’t pull myself together. It’s a term that’s loaded with judgement, but I mean it more literally than judgementally: my mind feels fractured to the point where it feels like I can’t (re)assemble myself.

    The fact that so many of us are feeling increasingly disassembled in these times is not incidental. In the first post of this series, I wrote:

    Assaults on our attention are not new, but inherent to (racial, patriarchal, ableist) capitalism. It is only the technological means by which this occurs that have changed.

    Having said that, these technological developments do matter. Their effects are unprecedented: the attention economy has enraptured us at a time of rapidly intensifying crisis for humanity. 

    Distraction is in-built to capitalism through a culture that keeps us hooked into supremacist, consumerist agendas. Toni Morrison’s comments on racism as distraction, from a 1975 speech, are still frequently cited, and for good reason:

    …the very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing. (PDF link)

    Speaking long before the existence of social media, Morrison was addressing a somewhat different kind of distraction, perhaps not so much predicated on a disassembled mind, but still very much intent on keeping oppressed people in their place, preoccupied with the oppressor’s agenda.

    Wresting our attention away from agendas designed to distract us is the basis for liberatory action. Yet, despite many of us seeing through the intent of these systems, we seem to be finding it increasingly hard to break out of the trance. This is where the attention economy has surpassed its predecessors: it’s consumer capitalism on speed.

    That sense that I have access to an infinite amount of information at my fingertips means I never feel fully satisfied by what I’m reading or experiencing – I’m always scanning for more. 

    The infrastructure underpinning the dominant commercial digital technologies has trained us to always want more. That sense that I have access to an infinite amount of information at my fingertips means I never feel fully satisfied by what I’m reading or experiencing – I’m always scanning for more. I haven’t done the maths, but it is entirely possible that I spend more time browsing books online – following algorithmic trails of recommendations, searching for books about whatever topic I’m currently interested in and, yes, buying new books – than I do reading the actual books I already own or have borrowed from the library.

    A mind trained to constantly look for more finds it incredibly hard to stop and process what it is absorbing. For me, it feels like a powerless state from which it is near impossible to act in alignment with my deeper values and desires. It often feels like a personal failure, and I have to remind myself that this is structural. The corporate interests that underpin the attention economy want us right here: as passive, distracted consumers.

    distraction starts early

    When I started writing about distraction in relation to my online experience, it struck me that there is another sphere of life in which people often talk about distraction: parenting and childcare. In this context, distraction is frequently an intentional strategy. Adults often use distraction tactics to get children to do/not do something.

    I hold my hands up: I am not immune to this. I am not super proud of the fact that I let my 3-year-old watch kids’ music videos on my phone when I get them dressed and brush their teeth in the morning, but it does have the magical effect of making them stay in one place for five minutes, and so I have taken to doing it.

    Children’s screen time is a big area of discussion and controversy that I won’t get into. Most parents and caregivers do the best we can given our circumstances. When I notice myself reaching a stage of sensory overload, I know I can let CBeebies entertain my kid for a while, giving me some time to breathe and regulate. It feels like the best option available to me in those moments. Thankfully, my kid also loves books (I may have had some influence there!), so we also have plenty of reading time, which is my favourite kind of cosy downtime.

    Four books laid out on a cloth: How to Do Nothing; My Must-Have Mum; Perfectly Peculiar Plants; and Oi Duck-Billed Platypus!
    Some books currently on rotation in our household.

    But another long-honoured childcare strategy involves distracting kids when they’re crying, angry, or feeling other strong emotions.

    You’re upset? Here, let me dangle this toy in your face.

    You’re sad? Here, let me tell you all the reasons you should be happy instead.

    Most of us do this to some extent – parents and other childcare providers – and I’m not writing this to pass judgement, but more to note how ingrained it is in our culture and how difficult it can be to resist.

    To give one example, when children are sad when their parents leave them at nursery, the staff will often distract them with toys or activities. I understand the impulse and the practical reasons why this may be necessary (and don’t get me wrong: the staff at my kid’s nursery are great, kind and endlessly patient – not to mention under-resourced!). But I’ve had to fight my people-pleasing demons and practise staying rather than rushing out the door, giving my kid another hug and some space to feel sad about our impending separation – rather than encouraging them to shut down their emotions.

    As someone who grew up not understanding my emotions or how to express them, I feel really strongly about the importance of supporting young people to become fully feeling humans. I am in no way perfect in this regard, and I often find it challenging to stay present with my kid’s strong emotions. But the way our culture teaches kids that strong, difficult feelings should be immediately suppressed is troubling – and central to the deep inequalities and crises we face today. This is how we have ended up in a society where we can’t sit with our difficult feelings. We are collectively distracted.

    (re)assembling ourselves

    As I was writing this piece – slowly, which is the only way I can really write, thinking and feeling my way through – I read How to Do Nothing again. Re-reading this book felt like such a gift, reminding me both of the necessity of slowing down to notice and process what is happening around us, and also of the importance of returning to the sources of knowledge and wisdom that we value (whether these are off- or online), to deepen our engagement with them, rather than always seeking out something new.

    As the world burns, we are becoming increasingly disassembled.

    I love that Odell’s work is expressly anti-capitalist. Her critique is not of the internet or online media per se, but of “the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction” (p. xii).

    Similarly, my point here in contrasting my wish to spend more time reading books with the addictive pull of my devices is not any simplistic books = good / screens = bad. It’s about my ability to think and act from a space of deep connection with myself and the world around me. This is what makes the attention economy – or should we call it the distraction economy? – and its impact on our minds and bodies a justice issue. As the world burns, we are becoming increasingly disassembled. This disassembly is designed to make us feel some combination of bad about ourselves and not very much about anything else.

    I was struck, a few months back, by Glory Edim’s (of Well-Read Black Girl) description of the effect of doom scrolling:

    It creates the illusion of knowing without the responsibility of being changed. You can absorb thousands of stories on Instagram and never metabolize a single one. So often we feel “informed” and yet untouched by experiences.

    Absorb vs metabolise. Being informed vs being touched.

    We are simply physically unable to metabolise the amount of information we are faced with on a daily basis. So we shut down and numb ourselves, by necessity.

    But metabolising what we encounter – at both thinking and feeling levels, if I may so artificially separate them – is the starting point for connection, with ourselves and with others. It is a process of (self-)assembly.

    Clearly, I’m not writing this from a position of having figured this out. I’m just here, imperfectly feeling my way towards something more connected, more collective. For me, it always seems to come back to feelings. To (re)assemble, we need to be able to connect to our emotions – and we need to learn to sit with them, even the difficult ones. That is the only way we can meet this moment – of racial capitalism in its violent death throes – and imagine and build towards something different.

  • listening to what our attention is telling us

    listening to what our attention is telling us

    attention: ad (to, towards)+ tendere (stretch). To stretch towards.

    Some years ago, I was captivated by a phrase:

    What you pay attention to grows.

    It comes from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and it is one of the book’s key principles. This idea felt so powerful in its implications that I started writing it down repeatedly in my journal and yearly intentions.

    I’ve been holding this phrase close again lately, as I’ve been trying to pay attention to my attention: Where it goes and where it doesn’t. Why it so often feels like I have no control over it. How I can be more intentional in where I place it.

    Attention has always felt tricky for me. I know I’m hardly alone. It is a topic on which so much has already been said – by writers and artists, productivity gurus, psychologists, scholars and many others. I’ve hesitated writing about it for this reason. My academic training tells me I don’t know enough about it. I haven’t conducted a thorough literature review.

    But precisely because of that trickiness – and because our capacity for attending to what matters to us is so central to our experience of our lives and our creative practice – it is a topic I keep circling around. “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work”, in the words of poet Mary Oliver.

    I wanted to get curious about my own patterns of attention: to notice how my attention swirls and circles, homes in or is lost – and to ask myself what happens in these different moments, what feelings are present, and what they can tell me. With a more expansive question in the background: how can I harness my attention?

    So, finally, I decided to write about it. Not from a position of expertise, but from a personal perspective – although my thinking, as always, is deeply indebted to and in conversation with that of others. I wanted to get curious about my own patterns of attention: to notice how my attention swirls and circles, homes in or is lost – and to ask myself what happens in these different moments, what feelings are present, and what they can tell me. With a more expansive question in the background: how can I harness my attention?

    I ended up having quite a lot to say, so one blog post turned into a five-part series! The rest of this post expands on why this topic feels so important – and so deeply entwined with both creativity and justice.

    our attention shapes the world

    The idea that how we focus our attention shapes our world is so inspiring to me on both a personal and political level. I plastered brown’s emergent strategy principle all over my notebooks as a reminder to myself that I can choose what I give attention to and what I do not, and that, in this intentional everyday choosing, I have the power to shape (my) reality.

    In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell offers a similarly powerful invitation:

    [P]atterns of attention – what we choose to notice and what we do not – are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. (p. xxiii)

    Of course, both brown and Odell are speaking to something more expansive than individual transformation, addressing the world-building capacity of attention on a collective level: together, by divesting from the trajectory of racial capitalist environmental catastrophe, we have the power to build new realities. We have the power to shape, change, seed, disrupt, disassemble our way towards something(s) altogether different, sustainable and interdependent.

    copies of the books Emergent Strategy (by adrienne maree brown) and How to do Nothing (by Jenny Odell) on a light wood effect desk.

    Together, by divesting from the trajectory of racial capitalist environmental catastrophe, we have the power to build new realities. We have the power to shape, change, seed, disrupt, disassemble our way towards something(s) altogether different, sustainable and interdependent.

    But collectives are made up of individuals, and the two types of transformation – individual and collective – are connected. If we don’t, as individuals, do our own personal healing work (part of which involves intentionally shifting where we put our attention), it is hard for us to come together with others for collective transformation.

    brown writes and talks about this connection between individual and collective change a lot. In Emergent Strategy, she evokes the words of her mentor, Grace Lee Boggs:

    Grace articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” This doesn’t mean getting lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet. (p. 53)

    Attention is so central to this kind of personal practice: what and who are we giving our attention to in our everyday lives? Who are we listening to? What are we noticing? What is not getting our attention? How does our attention show up in our relationships with the young people in our lives? With our neighbours and our local community? With nature and the more-than-human world? What kind of “work” (in a broad sense) are we attending to?

    attention is political

    Sadly, as most of us know, directing our attention is often easier said than done! Whether it’s getting stuck ruminating on things we would rather not give our attention to, or being unable to focus on the things we do want to do, our attention can be unwieldy and difficult to harness.

    While our inability to pay attention in socially sanctioned ways (think: school, work, generally listening to and obeying our “superiors”) is often framed as a personal failing (or, in the case of ADHD, a disorder), attention is political. What are we being commanded to pay attention to and who decides?

    Problems with attention are nowadays often chalked up to social media and the so-called attention economy. And, for sure, smart phones and social media are designed to hook our attention. I’m not planning to delve into debates on the harms vs benefits of social media here. But one thing I will say is that the attention economy is simply the latest iteration of a much older problem. Assaults on our attention are not new, but inherent to (racial, patriarchal, ableist) capitalism. It is only the technological means by which this occurs that have changed.

    Having said that, these technological developments do matter. Their effects are unprecedented: the attention economy has enraptured us at a time of rapidly intensifying crisis for humanity. Odell lays out the dire consequences that face us in these times, again drawing the connection between the individual and the collective:

    It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention”, then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. (p. 81)

    As part of this series, I will be thinking more closely about what and how we’re paying attention to what is happening in the world. This is something that I’ve been wrestling with on a personal level, as in the last few years I’ve found it increasingly difficult to pay attention to “the news”. I’ve chastised myself for this, as it has felt like a disengagement. But I wanted to dig a bit deeper, and I’ll be doing that in part 5, on when your attention refuses.

    divergent attentions

    Before wrapping up this first post, I want to touch on the relationship between attention and neurodivergence. From this perspective, there are additional angles and nuances to consider. This, of course, varies by our particular constellations of neurodivergent traits and many other factors (and I’m conscious I’m writing this as a non-ADHDer; I’ve not had my patterns of attention explicitly pathologised).

    As a late-diagnosed autistic person, it’s been eye-opening for me to have this new lens through which to understand my attention. I have always known that I have a high level of attention to detail (a common autistic trait), but access to knowledge about topics such as monotropism, “special interests” (although I don’t love the term) and Marta Rose’s notion of “spiral time” has shifted so much shame about what occupies my attention and how (I’ll say more about some of this in the next post).

    Being curious about my attention is by extension being curious about my feelings.

    Post-diagnosis, I’ve been working on learning to trust my own body and feelings, something which I was very alienated from, and which is an ongoing process. I’ve come to see how connected my attention is to my feelings and that, therefore, being curious about my attention is by extension being curious about my feelings. While I don’t necessarily feel I can “trust” my attention, I can trust that it is telling me something about how I feel, which in turn gives me information about how to respond in different situations where attention feels in some way tricky. So, this is an experiment in curiosity and self-trust.

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    In the next two posts, I’ll be exploring some different ways in which I have noticed my attention show up, first exploring “interested attention” (when I am paying close attention to something I am interested in) and, second, looking at “distracted attention” (when my attention is sucked into something I’d rather not be focusing on). In the fourth and fifth posts, I will be focusing on the flip side: when I want to pay attention to something but find it hard to do so. Specifically, I’ll be looking at how feelings of boredom and refusal show up for me and what they may be indicating.

    I notice discomfort coming up around how much I’ve used the words “I”, “me” and “my” already in this introductory post. Part of me is questioning whether sharing these personal experiences of attention is in any way interesting or useful to anyone else. But my hope is that they may lead to some insight, thoughts or questions that are interesting beyond my own experience – and that they may in some small way contribute to ongoing conversations about how we can practise attending to what really matters in this moment. Perhaps they will even spark a similar experiment of curiosity and self-trust in you.

    I’ll be posting a new instalment every fortnight or so. I would love it if you signed up to my newsletter – to be informed of when new posts go up and to continue the conversation.