Every child has experienced it: the lifeless anticipation for a lesson to end or the frantic begs for an interactive class game to begin, hoping it would relieve our inattentiveness. However, stepping into lessons as a first-time teacher, I hesitated – watching my classroom transform into an uproar of hoorays after the assembly of a Kahoot! game as my last resort to garner attention — not merely because I know all too well Kahoot’s inability to entrench meaningful knowledge, but chiefly as I saw among their oblivious smiles a diagnosis I recognized too clearly in myself.
Today, the pervasive development of artificially intelligent technologies has created an attention meltdown. In the last decade, our best-selling books had fallen by 11.8% in pages; since 1990, the average length of Billboard Hot 100 pop songs had decreased by an astounding one minute; last year, even our SATs had fallen an hour shorter, with reading comprehension questions averaged to merely two or three sentences.
“Where information becomes abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource.”
This was Herbert A. Simon’s psychological observation amidst the technological boom of the 1970s. While the mechanism of how our ‘rich information era’ consumes attention is much discussed in social media and political spheres, we seem to neglect technology’s efforts to personalize, attract, and fragment our habits within society’s most fundamental incubators – public classrooms.
According to Nathan Heller’s “The Battle For Attention,” 2023 marked a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited poor technological integration as an issue of digital distraction. Yet, we have been discharging, ever so rapidly, more technologies into classrooms in an attempt to transform student’s educational experiences.
However, the crux of the problem lies behind the mere gamification of knowledge or generative education platforms — in an attention economy, coined as the often invisible but pervasive commercial exploitation and monetization of our attention. And just like how time had replaced money as the predominant currency of transaction in Andrew Niccol’s In Time (2011), our attentions today – quantified by our clicks on screens, scrolling speeds, and even neural patterns – have become the newest dollar machine.
The attention economy has become the quintessential kernel and indispensable catalyst of our attention meltdown, where profit-driven architects form the backbone of our attention dynamics, laying no concern for the long-term development or enrichment of our education.
Such capitalization of students’ psychological vulnerabilities is cleverly hailed by Johnathan Haidt in his new book The Anxious Generation, likening it to the experience of growing up on Mars.
Imagine that your child has been chosen by a visionary billionaire to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars. However, they will be inevitably exposed to cosmic radiation while also having to navigate low-gravity atmospheric environments, increasing their risk of cancer mutations and bone deformities in their still-developing bodies. Worse still: the company did not require proof of parental permission.
In the same way, big tech has involuntarily set students onboard the spaceship to Mars, exposing us to novel ways of superficial learning (cell mutations) and porous attention spans (bone deformities).
Regardless of our situation, have we done anything to mitigate this?
Good news: the intelligence mercenaries of our attention economy have already taken leading steps in combating the attention crisis by introducing products that promise to enhance attention through various attention-capture methods.
For one, such technologies have taken the form of neural-detection monitors, which assess changes in our brain formations to analyze and amplify our attention spans. BrainCo’s introduction of the FOCUS Headband in 2019 is a prime example — intended to “improve concentration” with an emphasis on “not instill[ing] surveillance.” The headband is then linked to FocusEDU, a platform that “reports on classroom and individual learner attention states through electroencephalography (EEG) data,” looking to “review and promote calmer states of mind.”
On a larger scale, many schools currently require student usage of digital attention management tools like Class Dojo, a platform that assesses student focus via analytical summaries and parent-teacher surveillance of student engagement behaviors. Century Tech, another widely used attention-enhancing digital interface used through middle and high schools, “creates a constantly adapting personalized learning path for every student and provides teachers with rich real-time data insights.” Many studies have called out such platforms as a “technology of control,” with academics concerned by the overcentralized mechanisms of attention surveillance.
In many ways, my observations point to a similar conclusion. Such technologies, while with innovative intents, are habituating students to further unfreedom and overreliance, stripping away their autonomous abilities to actually leverage and direct their attention spans sustainably.
Notably, the design of such platforms prioritizes rapid shifts in content and quick feedback loops, weakening students’ abilities to sustain attention through multi-layered problems. By large, such tools also favor surface-level engagement rather than intellectual autonomy and criticality, fostering a “checklist” mentality. Furthermore, the normalization of surveillance, or what associate professors from the University of South Australia call “datafication of discipline,” can encourage students – especially younger ones – to be hyper-focused on performing rather than naturally engaging in focused study. As an international student studying outside the U.S., the mere experience of seeing exact platforms like Class Dojo and Century being utilized in nearby schools only epiphanize the sheer scope and breadth our attention economy has grown to become.
While experimentation with attention-enhancing technologies in classrooms is of aspiration, we cannot merely support our children’s bone deformities with a temporary brace – never scheduling any further surgical procedures to alleviate the long-term underlying harm. In the same way, we cannot keep familiarizing students with technologies that ‘promise’ to help them learn but rather, are mere ‘slogans’ bought and sold in a package – even worse, positioning them on a trajectory to further ‘dis-autonomy.’
Instead of relying on economic means to alleviate our crisis, we can turn to fundamental ways of educating attention to children. In The Nation’s article “Attention Capture,” author Jack Mullen suggests practical measures of implementing “attention formation as an explicit focus” in the educational curriculum as well as various alternative psychological methods to cope with attention in classrooms. This includes the practice of “voluntary attention” to deliberately enhance attention control, or exercising “sustained attention,” simple practices traditionally developed to medicate ADHD.
Regardless, we need to let students learn to direct their attention spans before exposing them to our economically fueled “attention-enhancing” market — ensuring long-term focus instead of short-term dependencies.
In Haidt’s words, “Let children grow up on Earth first, before sending them to Mars.”
Written by Julia Jiang
