Window-staring is an endangered attentional species schools mislabel as distraction

Evidence

Every time we think about our attention we should remember those prairies—and the monocultures that have replaced them. Because the attentional world we navigate today is monocultural: What we talk about when we talk about “attention” is, in fact, just one very narrow and specific (if also, now, totally dominant) species. It is the kind of attention that has been cultivated by a century of industrial “attention farming,” and we hardly remember all the other attentional modalities that it has displaced. Which attention has carpeted our landscape? The mechanomorphic, instrumentalized, stimulus-and-response kind of attention that became the central preoccupation of the military-industrial complex across the twentieth century. The kind of attention that focused on screen-vigilance (key for radar monitors and the monotonous labor of regulating machines), and the tap-click incorporation of human beings into cybernetic systems (key for shooting down enemy craft, or making timed decisions in complex models). This was the kind of attention studied in laboratories, quantified by advertisers, and now optimized by AI-driven search engine algorithms. And it is the kind of attention too many of us find ourselves trying to defend, or improve, or manage in our daily lives. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 488 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

What we have, what we need, are all the very different traditions and practices of human attention: techniques of meditation and prayer, modes of athletic concentration and focus, forms of spiritual leisure and play, the solicitous eye of mothers and grandmothers, the street smarts of the bona fide hustler, the essential absorption of a child in a sandbox. These enterprises are as different as pitchforks and soup ladles! What does Vipassana meditation (durational attention to the breath passing over one’s upper lip) have to do with that youngster in a batting cage, trying to learn how to hit a sinker? And what do either of these have to do with my neighbor, blithely walking her Yorkshire terrier? — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 436 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

After several decades of pedagogical experience and reflection, Robert Caron, director of the Centre Paris Lecture, recently positioned himself in opposition to many of the grievances concerning ‘children’s lack of attention, their restlessness, manic channel-hopping, their lack of inclination to listen to the sacred word of adults’. Rather than jump on the bandwagon of medicalized solutions or blame the internet, understood as a distraction machine, he suggested turning the problem back on teachers: children ‘don’t listen because there is nothing to hear’ in many of the words they are offered. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 260 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Diverse attentional practices form a common arsenal against attention extraction — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 436; Distraction enables perception that focused attention forecloses — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 338; Concern about attention span misdirects effort from recovering deeper attentional modes (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Industrial attention farming displaced diverse attentional modalities with one mechanomorphic species #corroborates (0.85) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 488
• Diverse attentional practices form a common arsenal against attention extraction #corroborates (0.82) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 436
• Concern about attention span misdirects effort from recovering deeper attentional modes #corroborates (0.80)
• Children’s inattention often reflects unlistenable teaching, not distraction #qualifies (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 260
• Distraction enables perception that focused attention forecloses #expands (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 338