from WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour is made in your attention to this show right now, to this conversation, to the words you're hearing.

How focused are you?

Are you checking your phone or texting someone at the same time, or doomscrolling, or messing around with TikTok?

Optimistically, we think of ourselves as multitaskers.

screens are everywhere.

We're used to it.

But lately something has been shifting.

Instead of shrugging our shoulders, we're looking at the issue of attention differently.

Here are some ideas that have catapulted into the mainstream.

The attention economy.

Attention.

Fracking.

Attention.

Capital.

These are concepts explored in a number of places, including Chris Hayes, his new book.

His writes that our attention has become commodified in the same way that labor was commodified during the Industrial Revolution.

It's being commodified by big tech.

Of course, Musk and Zuckerberg have learned how to capture our attention and then sell it, but it's also been commodified by politicians whose primary skill is getting us to stop what we're doing and focus on them.

Our attention is fracked by companies that have learned how to insert themselves into our faces or screens, even when we didn't ask for it.

The modern version of pop up ads that have always been so annoying.

And instead of resisting, we often click or scroll or give away our attention.

That's why a small but growing group of political leaders are proposing that we start adding a VAT, a value added tax to companies that profit off our attention.

Companies like meta and X and others.

But let's pull back a bit in your household.

How fractured is the attention?

Can you get together with family and focus on each other without the lure of screens or text messages?

Do we need specific training to get better at focusing and staying present and not being dominated or manipulated by tech?

Our guests are working on those questions and those problems, and there's a lot that we need to discuss this hour, and I want to welcome them now.

Gwen Alton is a facilitator, a conflict worker and author and attention activist.

Welcome back to the program.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having us.

Welcome in studio to Alexandria Wang, who is director of Learning and education at the MK Gandhi Institute for nonviolence.

Thank you for being here.

Hi and hello to Peter Schmidt, program director at the Struthers School of Radical Attention.

Hello, Peter.

Hi, there.

Thanks for having me.

It's the school of radical attention.

I mean, it's 20, 25.

We need that.

and we'll talk a little bit more about the way the Atlantic focused on some of the lessons from the Struthers School in a December piece, but do you want to describe a little bit, Peter, about the mission of the school?

Yeah.

Thank you.

So the Struthers School of Radical Attention is a small nonprofit.

We're based in Brooklyn.

And what we do basically is detention activism.

So we're interested in collective efforts to push back against the ways that our attention has been commodified, captured, measured, extracted, and sold, by manipulative technologies.

And many of the corporations that you mentioned in your intro.

And so the way that we do that at the school is through programs of study and practice, we're really interested in thinking more about attention, understanding what attention is and has been and what it could be, and also using our attention, you know, like getting muscle attention to something that you can develop and strengthen.

And it can also atrophy.

And so a lot of our programs involve bringing people together to think about attention, to think with attention, to give attention to each other.

and to imagine the possibilities for what collective life can look like in this time when the super precious part of us has been, taken away and turned into money.

Well, and you talk about atrophy, Peter, is it correct that there is a measurement of how long we are able to focus and it's dropped to something like 45 seconds?

Is this correct?

There are plenty of studies that have sought to measure attention spans, and this is actually the some.

This simple idea is the subject of a pretty intense debate.

There's reason to believe that what we call our attention span has diminished over the past several decades.

a lot of the work that we do at the school is acknowledging that fact, acknowledging the ways that our attentions have changed according to those measurements, and also pushing back again a little bit against the ways that attention has come to be conceived exclusively in terms of duration.

Right.

A number of seconds that you can stay on a single task.

We're really interested in the idea that attention is a far more complex thing.

It's far deeper, it's harder to measure in important ways, and that a proper recognition of that fact can bring us back into contact with many of the reasons why attention matters in the first place.

You know, you can't measure care for a loved one in terms of attention span.

Exactly.

But it's indisputable that your ability to care for the people around you is a function of your attention.

And anyone who speaks romance languages will know that attention and care are, they're the same word in a number of languages.

And we really believe that there are dimensions of attention that can't be measured quite so easily.

So much of our conceptual work, much of our community study revolves around that idea and the suspension of any clear sense of what attention is and how we can measure it.

When you are nodding briefly, when, I was talking about the dropping of our collective ability to focus, you know, and so I know these are imperfect measurements.

Yeah, but nothing at all that I read about that surprised me that, you know, that there it was 20 years ago when I was a young, very young, very young, very young journalist working in television news.

And we had paid consultants fly in to tell us that, well, you got to have shorter news stories.

No more than 30s at a time.

People don't know the attention span anymore.

So it doesn't surprise me, but it worries me.

What do you make of some of this study about our ability to focus or not focus?

Yeah, yeah.

And I really appreciate what Peter is saying, that attention is more than the duration of time.

And even if we just think about our attention as, something that could be measured just with time, it is a real bummer what's happened to I know, you know, ten, 20 years, right?

I, I think that there are a number of studies that are looking at how our, our attention span in terms of time has shifted.

And even if there's problems with some of those studies, when we just think about our own experience and, and speak with one another around, what does your attention feel like now versus how it how it felt, maybe before you had access to something that was constantly, designed to crack at your attention all the time.

Many of us feel a qualitative difference, a shift in our attention.

whether we are able to say how many seconds it is or not.

and, Alexandra, do you want to make some opening remarks before we kind of get into strategies here about how concerned you are, how concerned you think we should be about what's happening in the attention economy.

I'm really worried about how our attention is affecting the next generation of people.

one of the things that I'd learned from Glenn way back when we were first talking about technology and persuasive technology, was this idea that when, parents are functioning with their kids, they're also multitasking and they're also on their phones.

And there's this early developmental stage for children in which, face to face and eye contact is really, really important.

and so this idea that, I saw it happening with preschoolers getting picked up by parents where a parent would just come into the room and their kid would be so excited to see them.

The expression was there, but the parent is like half expressing like joy at seeing their child.

And then half on their phone.

And there's like this disconnect of, of human beings being human with each other.

Instead, there's this third party, the phone that, you know, a parent is working, or they have to pay attention to these other things to have the life that they want with their kid, but also this this child is trying to connect and using the skill set that they were born with, which is eye contact, and reaching out.

And things are not, clicking.

They're not clicking developmentally, we're having more and more young people who feel disconnected from their parents, disconnected from their peers, and connecting only through a device.

So these are things that I'm very worried about.

But also really interested in and how we can change or even utilize this tool in a better way.

Yeah, I'm really glad you brought this up, because there's there's a number of layers here that I think pretty much everybody listening will connect to in different ways here.

I want to start by saying that there will be whole separate conversations coming soon about the movement to ban cell phones in schools or smartphones in schools.

And I mean, not like you can have it in your locker, but like, they're not going to be in the school.

That's happening more and more.

I think JB Pritzker in Illinois, maybe the team wants to fact check me on this.

I think that today Illinois came out and said that they're going to support that, too.

and there's a lot of talk about how this affects kids.

I think it bears repeating that we're in trouble if we just act like, well, you know, kids are really distracted by screens as opposed to like, we all are like, I am for sure.

Yeah, everybody is.

And so there will be some very kid specific conversations coming.

Now, having said that, part of what Alexandrea brings up brings me back to that Atlantic piece.

And when I was reading about something I'd never heard of before, it was the still face experiments.

So there have been recently published I'm reading from The Atlantic, no spinoffs of a famous still face experiment conducted by a child psychologist named Ed Tronic in the 1970s.

The original experiment showed that infants will try to engage their parents by babbling, laughing, waving, and so forth, and the infant becomes frantic and disturbed when parents keep a stony expression.

Don't react at all because even though an infant can't articulate what they're what they're thinking, or if their ability to think about this is very, sort of very basic, they can feel that a parent is not engaged to or reacting to them, and it becomes a panicky moment.

So this was studying in the 70s.

The modern version of this is kids now.

Infants now have stone faced expression or still face expressions in their parents if the parent is just on a phone.

So the kids trying to get their attention and the parent is just not looking, not reacting, not present.

So you talk about picking up a kid from school and the kids, okay?

And the parent is on the phone and no response.

And that creates anxiety and that creates panic.

And I mean, I'm sure I've done it.

I'm not trying to be like at the top of the mountain lecturing.

But Alexandria, I'm worried about what that means.

What we are relaying to kids and what they are internalizing without even being able to express it.

That makes sense.

I mean, I, I know they can't talk about it, but they're feeling something, aren't they?

Absolutely.

I think because we think about intelligence and young people in ways that can be very, disturbing to me, in which, you know, you think, oh, babies don't know anything because they're babies.

They haven't lived in society and they don't know our rules, but babies have an innate level.

intelligence.

In order for them to be survivors, they are surviving in our society with very little material.

So what they have is this incredible human brain that is immediately curious, and their curiosity is toward the people closest and the things closest to them.

We are their first teachers, their environments when they're born.

That's their first space of education.

And so if the parent is not emoting to the child, if the parent is, you know, distracted in other ways, what can happen is this buildup of anxiety, the panic that you're talking about, anxiety in children can start really, really early, and they might not know what it is or how to describe it to you.

it might show up in a lot of young people as lack of play because they're feeling really anxious.

So this idea that you can put blocks in front of a child and they just feel so anxious and unsafe because no one has looked at them with like an expression of care, that they internalize as, oh, this is my person, this is who I will be with, and I will survive with this person.

without that, they're too anxious to play.

They won't pick up blocks.

They won't, explore their natural world.

so there is right now a surge of anxious children.

And we we like to blame lots of different things.

But I really want to think about how young people are connecting to their caregivers, their very first ones.

and this can go on and on to the caregivers after their parents, like their teachers and schools, their classmates as a form of caregiving, groups of kids hanging out together.

But they're all on their phones doing separate things.

That's that's not really the connection that the human species really needs.

Yeah.

You know, when I was thinking about the still face experiment and Alexandra's point that we can think about in infants, but what does it mean to a kid when they can't even get their friends attention, or they don't feel like their friend is present or listening, or a spouse or a partner or family members?

and that happens.

I mean, anybody listening right now who said, all right, no more phones at the dinner table.

Like, you get it right?

We all get it.

We've all been there.

Question starts to become like, what do we do about it?

Right?

Yeah, yeah.

And I, you know, there's a lot of tragedy that we're talking about in terms of some of the pieces that we feel like we've lost or losing with human interaction and I, I want to focus on strategies, and I also want to remind folks that this is a collective problem, that these tools have been built, with enormous amounts of funding and money behind them.

And they are designed to as the strength or skill sets, frak our attention, and they're really efficient at it.

And this we can have individual strategies and I think they're great and a good idea.

And we also need collective attention pulled towards collective action.

because I think just like a single person making really careful choices about, how they're engaging with the environment will not solve climate change.

A single person acting with their phone in a different way does not solve the problem of the attention economy.

and I'm happy to talk about some strategies.

So what does so take you to the next step?

Yeah, I certainly take that point.

What does collective action in this realm actually look like?

Yeah, yeah.

And I'd love to to hear from Peter on this too, because I think we are we're trying to figure it out and build it.

You know, I think there's lots of group.

You may have seen the New York Times just had an article about groups of young folks that started a Luddite club, getting rid of their phones, coming together, reading.

They have a paper newsletter.

Like you, I didn't see this actually called a Luddite club.

Yeah.

That's fun.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, I think there are pockets of groups, and, you know, I'm right now part of a fellowship of attention activists.

And we're meeting with small groups of people and engaging in practices together, where we're actively trying to discover and recover some of our attention.

and so I think there's things like that that can happen, I think talking about it in media spaces.

Right.

I think, there are many, pieces that people can work on to pull together collective action.

and we can also have individual practices like boundaries around how we're engaging with screens and technology when we're together, talking about it with one another, like what's working for us and what's not working for us when we're gathering as a group to do something.

and, and opening up discussions for making agreements together about how we want to be with these technologies.

And let me just follow this up for I turn to Peter on this.

When you talk about collective action and what might drive that one thing that seems to be driving that is the politicization of literally everything.

And so depending on how you vote, if you don't like what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, if you don't like Elon Musk on stage, then maybe you get off X or Twitter.

Maybe you say, I'm not doing Facebook anymore.

But what didn't get you there was this feeling that like, why do you need all my data?

Why is it feel like my phone is listening to me?

Why does it feel like everything that shows up on my feed now, half of the stuff is an ad?

Why are you always selling something to me?

So when you use the term, attention fracking, can you.

Can you define that?

What do you mean by that?

Yeah.

So this is a term that can actually from the founder of the Strother school diagram and he talks about this metaphor of, you know, at a certain point you run out of easily accessible oil.

And fracking is a strategy to extract more oil from something that's been quite depleted.

And so you're driving strong detergent and other stuff into the ground to shoot up more fragments of oil.

And so this is this metaphor for how the attention economy is, fracking our brains for more of our attention.

Right.

Like it used to be a complaint that there were just, like, advertisements everywhere.

Billboards.

Wow.

I can't look around without seeing an ad that's copycats, right?

Like we now have something that we carry around with us by by choice.

I'm putting air quotes or scare quotes around choice.

We have something in our pockets at all times that is constantly sending us physiological signals to pay attention.

And those signals, vibrations, red dots, sounds, all of these trigger environmental pieces of our brains that developed to pay attention to things in our environment.

And it is impossible for us to not move some of our attention, because part of our brain stem that's responsible for keeping us safe is drawn to those vibrations of signals or sounds.

I was listening to an interview with Congressman Jay Kotkin class this week who, he's one of the political leaders who would love to see a value added tax and some kind of intervention with these big tech companies.

But part of it album class is saying is if you don't really believe that they're commodifying your attention, just think about the phrase pay attention.

We are paying something.

We are.

We are spending something that is valuable to us, which is our attention.

And companies and politicians have gotten very, very good at taking that and then using it to gain power, using it to wield power, using it to get more attention, selling it, for a price.

So I want to turn back to, to Peter Schmidt, who is a program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention.

And before I get Peter's thoughts on what we do, which we're going to spend most of the second half hour, I just want to address one point that I think it feels dissonant sometimes, which is that if you look at just general polling of tech companies, they're still pretty popular.

and yet when you ask people individually if they feel dominated by social media or if they like the way things used to be better than now, they're like, oh yeah, it's awful.

These things are terrible.

These phones are terrible.

And they tell you that.

But, you know, the tech companies are still pretty popular.

I mean, they're mixed because of the politicization.

And then there's the question of, like, parents will talk about their kids, like getting co-opted by this.

And that's one thing that I'll conclude was talking about, he said, when people feel that dissonance, what they don't really feel decent about is the effect on kids, that there's this growing view that John Hite, many others have expressed, which is that we are ripping kids imaginations, creativity and childhood away from them and putting them almost exclusively on screens.

That affects them in ways that are not like other innovations of the past.

And so when we talk about what collective movement would drive that, it's this idea that you start with kids, but then you think about your own attention being commodified.

So I want to ask you, Peter, do you think there is, you know, sort of enough currency, enough energy to actually make this change?

Or is there too much dissonance?

I mean, people will say they, they hate social media, but they're on their phone all day.

They say they hate their phone.

They use it for six hours a day.

So how do you square some of this stuff?

Yeah, I would say the fact that people say that they hate their phone and the fact that they're on it for six hours a day are not contradictions.

Okay?

I think those are mutually supporting facts.

I mean, part of the thing that's missing, if we feel that there's some dissonance in the conversation, is the ability to connect the dots and to frame what's going on.

Right?

So it's easy enough to be on your phone for six hours a day and chalk it up to a lack of discipline.

Right?

You know, I just don't have enough willpower, to stay off of my phone.

And that frames the problem at a very small level, and ultimately at a level that's totally mis representative of what's going on.

So a lot of the work that we do is precisely this framing.

It's to say, hey, you're on your phone for six hours a day precisely because of $4 trillion industry.

If you do, the numbers all the way out wants you to be on your phone all day, because every minute that you spend on your phone is more behavioral data that can be collected about you than can be used to make predictions about you, and then can be used to ensure even more time on your phone.

So that's why framing is really important.

And that's why a kind of critical theoretical understanding of what's going on really changes the situation.

a phrase that we like to throw around in our community, at the school and at our kind of parent community, the friends of attention is you want to want it.

I'm sorry.

It's wanting what you want to want, right?

These devices, they prey on our desires.

They put stuff on our screen that's fun to look at.

But if we take a step back in most of the stuff that crosses my screen, I don't want to watch.

It just so happens that it hits that part of my brain that immediately triggers me to spend more time on my phone to click the next link, etc.

and so giving people a critical understanding of what's going on is the first step to pushing back.

Okay.

And so listeners, if you've got thoughts on this, maybe you've already made changes in your life, maybe you're frustrated, maybe you're worried about what's happening to kids or happening in schools.

or you've talked about it with your own sort of friends in social circles about the use of technology and screens and attention.

I'd love to hear from you.

And of course, given the fact that I've got a phone in my hand, there's lots of ways for you to contact us.

You can email the program connections at cyborg.

You can call the program toll free 844295 talk.

It's 84429582552636.

If you're in Rochester 2639994. and you can join us in the YouTube chat.

if you are watching on the Sky news YouTube page.

So yeah, we're on the different platforms.

I mean, so and I actually think Peter's point is really, really well taken even by me.

Like, I don't want to be on my phone as much as I am.

I sometimes feel like for work I have to or it's a bad habit that I, I use it in ways that I probably wouldn't if if I actually kind of peeled back and was more thoughtful about it.

Same thing with the show.

I mean, we're trying to balance a lot of things.

Same thing with sexy.

I can talk about TikTok all I want, but we'll probably be there until people aren't.

And, you know, I'd like more of us than to not be there.

But we're going to be there wherever you are is.

So I get Peter's point on the push pull and how some of that's not actually dissonant.

So, Peter, let me read something to you and we'll go across the table here.

Let's talk about strategies.

And, thank you to the Team Connections team here.

Producer Megan Mack sent a note saying eight and from the Associated Press just this morning, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is aiming to improve student achievement, social interaction and mental health public school students by proposing a statewide ban in Illinois on cell phones, in classrooms and schools, an idea that is rapidly gaining traction nationally regardless of political persuasion.

I can think of Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Arkansas, Republican.

So this is not a political Partizan issue.

I would not be surprised to see real critical mass on this across states really, really soon.

and that's a conversation we will have here soon.

But does it start there, Peter?

I mean, if you at least start with this environment where kids know that from K to 12, it's largely screen free, does that help?

I mean, is that a step that's part of the strategy here of creating the culture or a different kind of culture?

Absolutely, absolutely.

It helps, and this is this shift in policy at the level of school administrations, I think can be greatly credited to the work of John Haidt, who the social scientist whose book The Interest Generation really kind of connected the dots for people.

I think it came out last year.

and it accords perfectly with one of the the kind of three categories that we at the other school use to make sense of the tension activism.

So what is the tension activism?

Attention activism comprises education for teaching and learning, giving people, sensibility around what their attention is and what has happened to it.

Attention.

Activism is organizing and coalition building, creating networks among communities like Gwen and Alexandria and the rest of the folks that we work with around the country.

And attention.

Activism is sanctuary, and sanctuary is a really important word.

Sanctuary.

The idea that there are spaces that are protected from certain pressures that we take for granted in the outside world, we think that classrooms are very powerful spaces of sanctuary, that there's something special about stepping through the door of a classroom, setting down your kind of day to day concerns, and and suspending some of the normal assumptions so that you can learn about the world.

That said, simply removing phones is not going to do it.

It's at bottom a subtractive strategy.

It's about removal.

And the fact of the matter is that these devices don't just exert a power over us when they're in front of our faces.

they teach us how to attend to the world.

And this is an idea that has been really powerfully worked out, by Jack Mullen, who's one of the writers and and teachers at the school.

He also teaches high school in New Haven, Connecticut.

this idea that attention is learned, attention is always conditioned by our environment.

And it's so happens that whereas maybe two generations ago, attention was primarily acquired through interactions with your parents or with your school, now these tech devices have intervened really powerfully.

They're six inches away from kids faces, and they they literally condition forms of attention that can do this to further use of these devices.

So they teach us, you know, how to give our attention to TikTok.

And the problem with simply removing phones is that it doesn't answer the question of what kinds of attention we want to teach to our children, right?

Or to ourselves, for that matter.

And this is why the language of sanctuary is useful.

And this is why at the school, we have a strong emphasis on what we call the politics of yes, it's an affirmative vision.

It's saying, okay, these devices are bad for our attention, and there's an argument to be made that we ought to remove these devices from certain spaces.

Perhaps the dinner table, the home classrooms, libraries, museums.

Those are lots of different conversations.

But there are worthwhile spaces.

The setting, these these these, these little devices aside.

But the question remains, what kinds of attention do we want to develop, practice, deepen and share with each other?

and that is when we get into a more creative mode.

it's the spirit of saying, you know, we have an attention crisis, but you should never let a good crisis go to waste.

And this and this crisis has taught us that attention is deeply important.

And so what do we do with that awareness?

And that's, that's that gets us into conversations about strategy.

after we take this only break of the hour, we're going to go right through ideas on strategy from how we talk about this.

And I mean that matters, too.

I said that at the outset.

It feels like we're talking about it differently than even a month or a year ago.

For me, I'm hearing a lot more of conversation about the ways that our attention is actually commodified, sold, used, to sort of build power bases and thinking about it very, very differently.

So we're talking to Peter Schmidt from the other school of radical attention.

Alexandria Wang is here, director of learning and education at the MK Gandhi Institute for nonviolence.

Gwen Altman is here, who is a facilitator, conflict worker and author.

And I like this term an attention activists that's new.

So let's get this only break and right back to strategy and maybe some of your feedback as well.

On the other side, coming up in our second hour, I'm joined by John Daly of the Daly Brothers.

We lost his brother Joe a few years ago, but John, still performing, still the Rochester music legend that we remember the Daddy Brothers to be.

And there's a new book about them called singing from the heart, The Daddy Brothers Irish Music and Ethnic Endurance in American City.

We're going to talk to the author.

John's going to serenade us a little bit next.

Our.

Ireland may soon pass a bill banning trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

And in practice, what that would mean is that if you're a supermarket here and you're stocking dates that have been produced in illegal settlements, you'll be asked to pull them from your shelves.

I'm Scott Detrow.

How War in the Middle East reverberates in unlikely places.

That story, and all things considered, from NPR news.

This afternoon at four.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Let me grab a phone call from Randy in Fairport.

Hey, Randy.

Go ahead.

Hi.

And how are you doing?

I'm appreciating listening to your show, but I'm a little concerned about the loosely used word fracking and related children.

Fracking is a very dangerous activity.

And how the person described it doesn't really understand.

I have been part of.

No.

We, which protects our waters and fracking puts very, very dangerous chemicals into the ground to remove, you know, the gas that they're trying to extract.

And the problem is that we in our in the area where actually inside the geology that they're going after, it's shale.

But within that area, we also have some radioactive materials that are going to be drawn out.

so, you know, when, when they use these terms and they're, they're not scientific people trying to use them.

They really should be much more careful which ones they use in terms of, you know, talking about children's attention.

And so, Randy, I take the point.

And certainly that may be a term that you're not a fan of.

I respect that.

I respectfully disagree on that one.

I think what what what our guests are using is a term that I think illustrates in a very, I think, direct way, something beyond just this.

Well, you know, phones are kind of distracting or, you know, screens.

We should be on screens all day.

It's more like, you know, there's an intention here that companies that already have a lot of our attention are now going the extra mile to go deeper, to get below the surface and to break into our consciousness even when we don't expect them to be able to.

So you can get gas, you can get fossil fuels in different ways.

fracking is, as we've talked about, as a way to go deeper into the earth to get, you know, a harder to a harder to access source of it.

And so the idea that these companies are going to go as hard as they can to get every last minute of our consciousness and using the term attention fracking is, I think for me that works.

I mean, if for you it doesn't.

I respect that I'm with you, but I don't I don't know that it's going to confuse people about what the actual scientific, real world fracking is.

I mean, Gwen, are you comfortable with the term attention fracking?

Yeah.

And I, I want to first thank the caller for, yeah, feedback and also your work and activism.

And also you're going to be shocked to know I actually have a geology bachelor's.

And again, I want to I want to name not my metaphor or term and I do I do want to frame it is a metaphor, right?

It is.

The metaphors are not exact.

They're imprecise language.

and yeah, the point.

Point well-taken.

Yeah.

Dallas writes to say what I know.

What I know is I can be falling asleep and pick up my phone to make sure that I turn the alarm on, and I am very aware of how much my brain comes back online as soon as the screen lights up and starts shining into my eyes.

oh yes.

I mean, like, there are times where I'm like, why am I still awake at 1 a.m.?

Why have I been?

How long have I been scrolling?

What am I doing?

You know, and sometimes I think, well, I'll just check a few things before I go to bed.

As opposed to like, no, this is going to absolutely hijack my attention here.

So, Randy, where.

Listen, I hear you there.

and and and it will take it under advisement here.

Charlie writes to say, even as a communications major in the 1970s, I'm always reminded when people are discussing the media of a favorite aphorism and a concept from Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman.

McLuhan adroitly laid it out.

The medium is the message.

Hello, TikTok and Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Hello, Facebook.

TikTok.

Instagram.

I believe these two thinkers were decades ahead of our current world attention span.

What's that?

That is from Charlie.

Charlie.

There's a shiny object for you to go find, I'm sure.

no, I appreciate that.

Then that, those sources, I've been.

Well, those references have been oft cited for a number of good reasons.

And they are still, I think, very, very pertinent.

So now the question becomes, what else can you do?

And I want to give our guests the floor to tell you in their own sphere of work what it is that how they're trying to address the question of the attention economy and how they want, maybe, you know, or both individuals and society to address it?

I'll start with Alexandria, one.

Thank you.

a part of, the thing that Peter was talking about in terms of sanctuary, there's educational spaces that I would consider sanctuaries.

I really like this concept.

I was a school librarian before, so one of the things that we teach in, in our classrooms in terms of, like how to use technology is persuasive.

Advertisement.

getting young people to realize, oh, what are they advertising to you?

And why is that?

And then how are they doing it?

So sometimes the how is like, oh, I they're making me feel really lonely or they're making me feel really ugly.

I'm feeling really bad about myself.

Then they tell you this thing is going to make you better than you are, and then they tell you how to get it.

And the way to get it is super easy there.

It's just one click away and you can have this type of, personality or physical appearance.

This cure.

Exactly.

Whatever it is, I'm getting those advertising.

I don't know why all the time.

It's because they have collected enough information about us, and now they are personalizing ads to us by hitting on the things that we desire, hitting on the things that we feel really insecure to about.

And so, the caller earlier definitely talked about danger.

And I do want to talk about the danger of young people being allowed unfettered like this, access to a world of adults telling them you are not good enough, and here's how to be better.

And once young people go, oh, wait a minute, they're trying to sell me something, I, I'm going to try to analyze what this is and just the time it takes to analyze it is the time away from the phone or the time away from the advertisement to be like, you know what?

They're not going to get me swerve like, this is not happening.

Miss, I understand what you're trying to tell me.

So education, understanding how advertising works, what they're trying to do, what they're trying to make you feel and resisting because people are resilient and they they can resist these things.

Well.

And so when Alexandria talks about teaching people to understand, what are we paying attention to and why?

Why are we paying attention in the first place?

What gets our attention and how do they customize that for it?

So all the beautiful listeners with full heads of hair, like, well, I don't have I don't have hims on my feed and Facebook.

Well, I do may have figured out that I, you know, I've lost a few hairs to the top of my head and they want me to feel insecure about it.

They want me to feel like, well, you know, real alpha males like Elon, who was going bald.

He's got a full head of hair and it's amazing.

There are there are ads, by the way, implying that Elon Musk got his hair back from a pill, which I think he actually had a transplant.

But they don't tell you that outright.

They want you to believe that because they want to create this paradigm of what an alpha male is.

And if you're anything less than that, well, you know, you're going to need this product.

I've got something to sell you.

I've got a way I can make you feel.

I can get your attention, and now I can sell you something.

And what Alexandra is talking about is actually a form of media literacy.

I think this is, is 2025 media literacy.

That should be for all of us.

I mean, all ages, I think.

Agreed.

Yeah.

So.

All right, Gwen, take us through what else we should be thinking about.

man.

Yeah.

So I spent a long time focusing on the education piece I used to do, like, workshops with schools and community organizations on, like, why it is that persuasive technology gets such a hold on us, you know, what are the exact strategies these companies are using?

but I have been grateful to the Strother school for this idea of sanctuary.

And now I feel more excited and committed to the idea of doing some education, but really focusing on attention sanctuary.

So we've got this.

Alex and I are both part of this project right now where, you know, we're meeting every every couple of weeks to practice different forms of attention together.

And we actually have one coming up this Saturday where we're focusing on reading attention.

I mean, I don't know how many people I've talked with in the last ten years that tell me they can't read anymore.

so, yeah, I think finding spaces, whether it's with us or just who they can't read, is they can't make themselves sit down and stay with a book.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, we didn't become illiterate.

Are you literate?

Do it.

It's about attention span and focus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, and we've done a series on listening, on walking.

So I think finding ways to see what notice what you notice that's off of your phone, and get curious about yourself and where your attention is drawn to and begin to make some of your own attention.

Sanctuaries.

And then, you know, I have 50 million tips about things you can do with your phone if if folks would like.

But guessing we don't want to spend a bunch of any time.

Can you give me 1 or 2?

Yeah.

I mean, one thing is turning all notifications off of your phone, unless it's from someone or people that you need to be able to hear from.

How will I know though, if someone like to post?

Oh yeah, it's the rub, Yeah.

And I do think you go through a little bit of withdrawal at first, right?

If you turn those things off and then you realize like the world still is happening.

Well, and I actually want to press the second point that Gwen is making there, unless it's something that somebody that you feel like you would need to hear from, I think that that number is a lot smaller than most of us think these days.

as someone who now coaches youth sports or I used to be a camp counselor back in the day, and I still talk to the camp director of the camp that I worked at in summer camps.

It's amazing how often parents are like, well, I have to be able to get Ahold of my child at any point.

So they're going to need a cell phone.

It's going to need to be on.

They're going to need to check it.

And I've had parents say, like, I need my kid to check it periodically during practice to see if I've sent any messages.

And I'm going, like, do you really?

Do you want him to do that?

Like, are you sure you.

And I'm trying to respect that, but I think we've convinced ourselves that if we can't get Ahold of a child at any point of the day, or at every point of the day that they're somehow this, you know, life and death disconnect.

And I don't want to be the guy who's like, well, you know, my mom's like, come back at dinnertime.

And I went out and played in the creek on the side of a cliff.

Like, I mean, I get it like we can all talk about that, but we did exist before.

People could constantly find you at any point in your life.

Yeah.

And I think it's a smaller amount than we would all probably define.

Like, who do you need to be able to get Ahold of you at any point?

Yeah, it's a short list, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

And we can think about what that does to our attention during a practice.

You know, if we need to be constantly attending back to a small box.

Yeah.

Also, I should say on the air right now I'm just going to this is kind of funny.

maybe it's because the universe is telling us this, but a lot of our platforms are down right now.

So.

So if you're watching on YouTube and there's only one camera that's working, we've got a switcher issue.

We're working on it.

but also and that might even be down, who knows.

and also, if you see me checking my phone, it's because they have to text me any messages.

I can't even use the screen here.

So anyway, the YouTube screen is the stream is down and it's going to be available on passport later.

And I'm sorry that we're actually limited in the number of streams that we're on.

Isn't that funny?

okay, Peter Schmidt, the floor is yours.

and the other school.

This is all about what you do here.

The school of radical attention.

What can people do?

Yeah, I'm I'm struck by the metaphor or the analogy that the this moment is akin to the industrial revolution.

you attributed it to Chris Hayes.

It's a it's a really powerful idea that, you know, when previously our labor was commodified by new technology.

Now our attention is being commodified by new forms of technology.

And that's a great descriptive analogy.

And you can take it even further and put it into action.

You can say, well, what do people do about it?

Back then?

They they organized, they got together, they got to the problem, and they created communities of solidarity around the protection of their labor.

This is what we call unions, you know, and that was a powerful moment in the history of politics, because it produced what we now think of as labor politics.

We believe that there's an analogous shift going on right now that just like the laborers in, you know, Manchester and Leeds and Liverpool, in the during the Industrial Revolution or what's called the Industrial Revolution, we are seeing people create communities of solidarity around the protection of their own attention.

So in practice, that just means get together, get together.

Like the number one step is don't sit at home and wonder why you feel so bad.

because the reason that you're feeling so bad is connected to the fact that you're alone in the first place.

Everything that we put this together, school is about getting people together to think about the problem and then to respond to it.

And what's central to that strategy is this emphasis on collective attention.

Right.

So we each have our individual experiences of attention.

but I'm sure that all of the viewers out there have had some experience in their life where they were with other people and their attention, their attention was moving in similar directions.

Either they were engaged in, you know, they were gardening together or watching a sports game or in a deep conversation.

And they had this experience that they were on the same wavelength.

You know, that experience, which is so precious is, you know, what we call collective attention.

And we think that collective attention is what makes politics happen.

It's the precondition of politics.

Like, you know, politics is about disagreeing often, but you can't even disagree unless you can agree on what you're what you're disagreeing about.

Right.

And so we're really, really interested in the ways that we can get people together and practice attention such that they have this experience of collective attention so that they have a sense of a shared world only at that point when people then start to say, okay, this is our world, I'm in it, you're in it.

We see the same things more or less now, what are we going to do about it?

So that's the first step.

And then the second step is, well, there's plenty of ways you could go from there.

Gwen has talked about them a bit, but simply to practice attention.

Right.

These communities of solidarity, they're mission as we've seen them sprout up over the country and internationally, is to get people together and to see what happens when they share their attention.

And in generative ways.

And the important thing to say about these communities is that it's not reinventing the wheel.

It's not like, well, I guess I should go round up my neighbors and we should learn how to do bonsai, because that seems like a uniquely attentive activity.

No, we actually think that there are plenty of there are countless activities, commitments, pastimes out there that people are already doing that 20 years ago would have just been, you know, bowling or gardening or surfing or book clubs.

But now, because we're in these really unique historical conditions, those activities have become a form of attention.

Practice, right.

in a world where the thing that lets us be together has now been taken from us and commodified and polluted.

To be able to do those things is a meaningful form of resistance.

So we encourage people to go out, get together and to do the things that you like to do together already and to remember that this is happening within a context where your ability to do those things is meaningfully endangered.

And but by doing that, you're pushing back and you're making friends and you're having fun, and that's how you make the revolution irresistible.

if people want to learn more about what you're doing at the Strother school, how do they find you?

Peter?

Yeah, we're at School of attention.org school of attention, dawg.

And then we're also to many surprise on Instagram at School of Attention.

We're right up there in the trenches.

You can find us on Instagram.

You can find us online.

You can also find us at School of Attention on Blue Sky.

So you know, we're on all of these platforms too.

Yeah, I mean, that's where people are.

I mean, we can talk about eventually moving society less addicted to that, but I understand I understand entirely.

real briefly, a little bit of feedback here, Carly says.

Journalist Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus talks about falling literacy rates correlating with reading being taught on screens.

This gap and understanding between books and screens is big enough that in elementary school children, it's the equivalent of two thirds of a year's growth in reading comprehension, he writes.

And Carly concludes, we are atrophying our kids attention.

School boards need to understand that technology does not equal progress.

That's from Carly.

I think that's powerfully said.

Thank you.

Carly.

and Sue and Henrietta got to keep it tight.

Hi, Sue.

Go ahead.

Yes, I know time's short, but I would be very interested in hearing, panels address just that the use of screens by the schools.

It seems like our students, right from kindergarten.

They're being put on screens.

Yeah, I mean, they are, And you're not in here going.

What do you think?

Yeah.

There's been a lot of interesting research about how we read really differently on screens and in print and obviously reading as a form of attention and a form of education and learning.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think there is there's work to be done across the lifespan.

I think it's easy for us to collectively care about youth sometimes more than it is of just adults.

But I think we're all deeply impacted by these and all of our attention matters.

Yeah.

Alexandra, what do you think?

yeah.

These are outside organizations and selling technology to schools.

So they're saying to schools, you know, you could do this better, maybe you're not enough.

And then schools feel this anxiety and they're like, okay, I'm going to buy for my kids.

So they're just hitting us where we're insecure and marketing things to us and selling them to us.

And now we're at where we are, where technology is actually like breaking in the school building and can't be used anymore.

And we have to do things by hand.

And the convenience of it is lost.

So yeah, it's a lot of things.

A lot of it I think is insecurity.

It's a lot of pay and buy and what you're going to do, anything you want to mention as we go hear about what people might be able to do locally.

Yeah.

You can reach out to me at Cool Gwen College, EWTN on Instagram or at Gmail if you want to join our community of attention activists.

Okay, Alexandra, anything you want to add there?

we're meeting at a library, and I love libraries.

Yeah, that's one of the great places you could go as a sanctuary for attention as well.

Yeah.

Thank you both for being here in studio with me.

Great having both.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Peter Schmidt from the Strother School of Radical Attention.

Thank you for being generous with your time.

I really love what you guys are doing.

Let's stay in touch.

Right on.

Thanks for having me.

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