"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." I often think of this line from the writer Annie Dillard. And these days, I'm afraid to admit how much of my time is spent online, my mind jostling around in a sea of infinite scroll. There's little about what I encounter online that I actively choose — and I suspect the same goes for you. That may seem trivial, moment to moment. But what are we losing over a lifetime of stolen attention? That question is at the core of the latest episode of "The Ezra Klein Show," with D. Graham Burnett. A professor of the history of science at Princeton University, he's working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. He argues that social media platforms and advertisers are "fracking" our attention — extracting increasingly marginal amounts of it by pumping increasingly shrill content into our information environments. And he thinks what's at stake is something far beyond our productivity or even our mental health. "This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing," he says. "We know this. And we need to mount new forms of resistance." Thankfully, Burnett is also exploring what this resistance might look like. He's a co-founder of the Strother School of Attention, a grass-roots collective creating a curriculum for studying the matter. And he shares many of the insights he's gained, both as a scholar of attention and as an organizer at the Strother School, in this conversation. It's beautiful, eclectic and meandering in the best way — much like an afternoon walk in which time falls away, much like the pleasure of paying good attention. I hope you'll give it a listen.
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2024/06/01
Opinion Today: Your mind isn’t scattered. It’s being fracked.
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Keep a civil tongue.