Concern about attention span misdirects effort from recovering deeper attentional modes

Evidence

Don’t worry about your “attention span.” Worry about reclaiming the deeper, broader, and more various forms of attention at the center of curiosity, play, love, and freedom. From the shared experiences of these other attentional modes will arise a new and better world. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 477

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: The essay could argue that ‘attention span’ is a red herring worn down by productivity culture, and that the real crisis is the atrophy of curiosity, play, love, and freedom as attentional modes.

Related

• The ‘attention span’ concept is a historically recent, lab-derived construct. (similarity 0.86)
• The distraction problem is not short attention spans but the instrumentalization of attention itself. (similarity 0.84)
• Most people equate attention with screen-based task focus (similarity 0.84)
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention. (similarity 0.82)
• The attention economy rests on a hidden false premise about attention. (similarity 0.81)
• The dominant monocultural attention is mistaken for attention itself. (similarity 0.81)
• Screen culture trains us to misperceive attention as singular and task-oriented (similarity 0.81)
• Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. (similarity 0.80)
• The modern concern over short attention spans inherits a military-industrial definition of attention (similarity 0.80)
• Debates about attention are ultimately ontological, not political (similarity 0.80)
• A generational shift from deep attention to hyper-attention is underway (similarity 0.80)
• Attention science defined attention as visual, durational, and cybernetic to fit its funders’ tools (similarity 0.80)
• Modern ‘attention’ is a narrowed, instrumentalized construct far removed from lived human attention. (similarity 0.80)
• Genuine attention is astonishment rather than anticipation (similarity 0.80)
• The fix for attention problems is collective attentional freedom, not individual span (similarity 0.79)