Both civic groups and apps train attention, but in opposed directions

Evidence

Perversely, the Girl Scouts and TikTok fulfill, in the final analysis, a similar purpose: both condition their participants to certain kinds of attention—which is to say, certain ways of being with the world and each other. Girl Scouts learn a kind of attention oriented toward teamwork, healthy self-regard, and benevolent entrepreneurship; they learn to deal with each other across years, as they manage relationships and strive for estimable craft skills in their community. TikTok users learn a kind of attention engineered for quick hits of dopamine, incessant stimulation, and the maximization of time on device. The former is, basically, pretty good for girls. The latter is, mostly, very, very bad for girls. And while the Scouts may meet once a week at the middle school gym, a young user can “meet” with TikTok wherever she goes, with minimal effort, absolutely all of the time. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 297

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames attention itself as a teachable disposition — the shared substrate that makes Girl Scouts and TikTok comparable institutions.
• XREF: Girl Scouts vs TikTok as competing attention-conditioning institutions resonates with the reader’s Frankfurt School material on how institutions shape social character. — connects to: American civic engagement spans widely varied forms and scales simultaneously. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 66