Second Blog Assignment: Paying Attention to Attention

Due: April 17 by 11:59 p.m.

Although this assignment isn’t due until April 17, note that you’ll need to start collecting data for the assignment no later than April 10. See below under What you’ll do for this assignment.

This assignment asks you to pay attention to your attention and write about what you discover. The assignment is pretty simple, but it requires some background to make it clear. We need to first consider the importance of attention in Thoreau’s writing and in the digital age.

Attention in Thoreau

Attention is a central theme in Thoreau’s works. Thoreau not only pays close attention to natural phenomena, attempting to capture his observations in precise descriptions; he also pays close attention to how attention works—for example, to the way external circumstances and our own preoccupations influence and shape our perceptions.

Leaving my boat, I walk through the low wood west of Dove Rock, toward the scarlet oak. The very sunlight on the pale-brown bleached fields is an interesting object these cold days. I naturally look toward [it] as to a wood-fire. Not only different objects are presented to our attention at different seasons of the year, but we are in a frame of body and of mind to appreciate different objects at different seasons. I see one thing when it is cold and another when it is warm. (Journal, November 17, 1858.)

In criticising your writing, trust your fine instinct. There are many things which we come very near questioning, but do not question. When I have sent off my manuscripts to the printer, certain objectionable sentences or expressions are sure to obtrude themselves on my attention with force, though I had not consciously suspected them before. My critical instinct then at once breaks the ice and comes to the surface. (Journal, March 3, 1854.)

Famously, Thoreau worried about the potential of new communications media to hijack people’s attention from the things that really matter. In Walden, he writes:

As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. (Walden, “Economy”)

And in his essay “Life Without Principle,” he writes:

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were, — its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long.

If we have thus desecrated ourselves, — as who has not? — the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. (“Life Without Principle”)

The relevance of these last two quotations to our present-day technological environment is obvious. That the “pretty toys” of our time—especially computers and smart phones—“distract our attention from serious things” is, to borrow Jane Austen’s words, more or less “a truth universally acknowledged.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Thoreau is responsible for the first recorded instance of the expression “brain rot”:

… in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Marketing attention in the digital age

In his book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, author and legal scholar Tim Wu chronicles the modern history—from the newspaper advertisements of Thoreau’s nineteenth-century to the “sponsored” Google search results of today—of the effort to monetize our attention. Although Wu shares Thoreau’s concern about the distractions of modern media, his emphasis is less on individuals’ need to develop better habits of attention and more on the need for laws and regulations limiting the ability of commercial actors to treat our attention as a commodity.

Without such laws and regulations, Wu argues, our minds are at risk, and so, as a result, is our freedom. In his epigraph, he quotes the late nineteenth-century philosopher William James:

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

The commodification of our digital attention—not only through relentlessly obtrusive advertising but through invasive and persistent tracking, collection, and sale of data about our online activity—has, he argues, compromised our freedom to decide for ourselves what we shall pay attention to. At the end of the book, he returns to James:

At bottom, whether we acknowledge it or not, the attention merchants have come to play an important part in setting the course of our lives and consequently the future of the human race, insofar as that future will be nothing more than the running total of our individual mental states. Does that sound like exaggeration? It was William James, the fount of American Pragmatism, who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived.

What you’ll do for this assignment

For at least a week before the due date of this assignment (longer if you like), track what you pay attention to. A great way to do this would be to create one or more journal files from the command line, using the same script you use for in-class journal files, and jot down notes there. But do whatever works best for you. The important thing is to create a record of your attention that you can look back at and review, and that you can use to document what you write in your blog post.

Pay particular attention to what you “agree to attend to,” as William James puts it, and what you’re forced to attend to. That is, pay particular attention to your freedom of attention. What uninvited distractions, specifically in your digital environment, are compromising your control over your “life experience”?

If you wish, you can certainly document those times that you allow yourself to be distracted through lack of discipline. But you needn’t. The assignment is not an invitation to beat yourself up for not paying attention to what matters most. Rather, it’s an invitation to quantify and analyze some of the forces, especially those in your digital environment, arrayed against your autonomy.

In addition to taking notes, consider documenting uninvited distractions using other media: photos, screen grabs, audio capture, etc.

In your post, use the data you collected about your attention and the forces impinging on it to reflect on whether, and to what extent, you were able to “live your life” according to your own dictates under the pressure of the distractions you encountered. If those distractions took something away from your autonomy, how did they do so? Do you think that paying attention to those distractions will change anything about how you negotiate your digital environment going forward? (It’s fine if your answer to that last question is “No.”)

How you’ll do it

As with the first blog post assignment, draft your blog post in one of your journal files using Markdown. Use the preview pane in VS Code to make sure everything looks right.

When you’re happy with what you’ve written, log into the site, go to the group’s blog, Digital Humanities at Geneseo, click +New in the black ribbon at the top of the site, select Post, and paste your post content from VS Code into the editor there. The editor understands Markdown! Use the Preview button in the post editor to see how your post will look when published.

Be sure that you’ve given your post an appropriate, descriptive, engaging title (not something generic, such as “Blog Post #2”), and that neither the title nor the date is included in the body of your post.

As with the first blog post, document any use you make of GenAI right in the post.

When you’re ready to submit your post, click Submit for Review.

How your post will be evaluated

In your blog post, did you …

  Not really A little bit Somewhat Pretty much Yes!  
include a detailed account of what you paid attention to in your digital environment for the past week? □ □ □ □ □  
pay particular attention, in providing this account, to both what you “agree[d] to attend to” you found yourself forced to attend to? □ □ □ □ □  
use the data you collected about your attention and the forces impinging on it to reflect on whether, and to what extent, you were able to “live your life” according to your own dictates under the pressure of the distractions you encountered? □ □ □ □ □  
use care in the composition of your post? □ □ □ □ □  
format your post correctly using Markdown? □ □ □ □ □  
document any use you made of GenAI? □ □ □ □ □ □
properly include any media content you chose to include? □ □ □ □ □  
give your post an appropriate, descriptive, engaging title? □ □ □ □ □  
keep the title and date out of the body of your post? □ □ □ □ □