New Economy of Attention
Eric Gordon is a scholar of new media, with a special interest in place-based digital communities, social networking, and virtual environments. He has recently published articles in
David Bogen is the author of
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
The nature of the academic lecture has changed with the introduction of wi-fi and
cellular technologies. Interacting with personal screens during a lecture or other
live event has become commonplace and, as a result, the economy of attention that
defines these situations has changed. Is it possible to
Making student attention part of the design of the classroom experience
New Economy of Attention
In an industrial society, the scarce resources are goods and services. In an information society, the scarce commodity is not information — we are choking on that — but the human attention required to make sense of it. Human attention-structures work differently from goods and services and will require a new kind of economics and a new kind of economist. The economists have not realized this yet, but then neither have the rest of us.
University students are browsing Facebook on their laptops and sending text messages to
their friends when they should be focused on the lecture; they are tending to their
instant messages, their playlists, their television shows, and their shopping while they
do their homework. These are the laments of the contemporary professoriate, daily
confronted with a generation of digital natives whose work practices and patterns of
attention appear to be multifocal, multivocal, and driven to distraction. As Mark
Edmundson has recently commented, University students now are virtual
Hamlets of the virtual world, pondering possibility, faces pressed up against the
sweet-shop window of their all-purpose desiring machines. To ticket or not to
ticket, buy or not to, party or no: Or perhaps to simply stay in and to multiply
options in numberless numbers, never to be closed down
automatic professor machines
new economy
?
This article takes its point of departure from questions concerning the texture and
shape of this emerging economy of attention. Our concern is not to critique the new
social media as extensions of a shallow and historicall amnesiac mass culture, nor
alternatively to take a position on the efficiency of new technologies for delivering
educational content or their efficacy at meeting students where they live,
and
thereby entering into the competition for their time and attention. Indeed, our central
concern is not about technology at all, but is instead about more stable and enduring
features of human performative practice that enter into and shape the physical and
symbolic sites of teaching and learning wherever and however they are organized. And, as
we will argue, it is precisely these basic conventions of the sited work of education
that are placed at issue by the availability of easy-to-use interactive technologies.
Rather than seeking to ban these devices from the lecture hall and the classroom, we aim
to ask what precisely they have on offer for a culture that equates individual
attentional behavior with intellectual and moral aptitude.
AttentiveSubject
We live in a society where the inability to focus attention is labeled pathological, where millions of young people are diagnosed and treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) each year, and where the ability to focus one’s attention is tantamount to proper socialization. As agents of socialization, the onus of responsibility has long rested on educational institutions to combat the epidemic of wandering minds and diminishing attention spans. Indeed, with the recent clinical classification of ADHD, success or failure at this task can now be evaluated through measurable diagnoses (http://newideas.net/cgi-bin/adhd-test/questionnaire.pl). The pathological designation of ADHD provides a clear backdrop against which educational institutions and other social agencies define and manufacture attention as a property of singular focus. As a result, the possibility of a nuanced appreciation of the complex structure of attention is near absent in the contemporary discourse about knowledge acquisition and modern subjectivity.
This reified conception of attention — as something that is more or less a property
of individual neurophysiology and behavior — stands in contrast to a history of
philosophy in which the concept of attention has evolved in line with differing
conceptions of mind. For example, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel
Kant believed that perception was a priori
take it all in
; they had to
focus their attention on individual matters, or risk reaching the limits of their
mental capacity. In response to concerns about the rapidly growing modern metropolis
during the turn of the last century, the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that
daily life in the city required a shift in the psychic life
of the individual. The intellect, he
stated, serves as a protective
organ
and the mind functions like a calculator, capable of transforming the world into an
arithmetical problem and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical
formula
state of distraction,
as Walter Benjamin
characterized it
Distraction and attention go hand-in-hand. The very same new technologies and
landscapes that cultivate a state of distraction are themselves directed
simultaneously toward the cultivation of attention. Walking through Times Square the
mind is distracted by multiple simultaneous stimuli, each of which is vying for our
attention — the moving images, the street vendors, and the billboards. According to
Jonathan Crary, modern distraction was
natural
kinds of sustained, value-laden
perception that had existed for centuries, but was an
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, educators have strategized about how best to employ complex visual stimuli (photography, film and painting) in the classroom, not as an object of study, but as a means of focusing attention. The psychologist Hugo Munsterberg, in his 1909 book
The greater the manifoldness of connections in the attended material, the richer the relations, the fuller the meaning, the more significant the parts, the more important the ideas involved, the more responsive the pupil’s attention will be. It can shift and change and remain always fresh without leaving the work and without the mind wandering outside the classroom.
Munsterberg’s depiction of how to capture the pupil’s attention remains influential
within the contemporary rhetoric of e-education. New technologies are employed to
make attentive the naturally distracted minds of youth, but they are rarely employed
to formulate the relationship between structures — or better,
We take this choreographic project as our central pedagogical task. The present essay
grows out of a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities where we
are studying the integration methods of remote participation and digital backchannels
into live scholarly events (http://digitallyceum.org). We are particularly interested in the physical
organization of attention and distraction as audience members at a lecture or
conference interact with one another across multiple channels and sites. Laptops and
wireless devices are increasingly present in academic settings. Rather than assuming
that their presence takes away
from an established order of attention, we are
seeking to understand how they reconfigure that order in ways that might allow for
new methods of engagement. In practice, with the introduction of networked
technologies into the traditional academic setting, the attention of individual
audience members is redirected from a single stream of speech to the presence of
other audience members interacting with a global network of ideas. In the absence of
strong conventions for shaping the conduct of these events, the presence of the
network and multiple channels for interaction could, indeed, prove highly
disorienting. For this reason, we have made a series of deliberate choices about how
we incorporate technologies into this context and how we introduce these channels of
communication to the participants. We have designed a suite of backchannel
tools and incorporated them into the physical lecture setting so that we can observe
how these additional channels change the texture of attention: how the audience
directs their glances, how they situate their bodies, ask questions, and in all these
ways, demonstrate a new and different order of what it means to be attending a live
event. We are not suggesting that the mere presence of digital backchannels
positively enhances the academic setting; rather, we suggest that, if properly
choreographed, these channels, just like the organization of chairs and podiums in a
lecture hall, can augment the live event in new and powerful ways. Where this
intentional choreography is present, the mind wanders from the focal event
,
but does so purposively, with guidance from the organizers, the tools, the speakers,
and the other audience members. Much as the controlled burning of a forest enables
safe and healthy growth of an ecosystem, controlled distraction enables participants
to experience richer, multimodal relations without wandering outside the space(s) of
the event. In this article, we depart from the trend in the literature on e-learning
that continues to treat distraction as a problem to be solved as opposed to an
emerging set of practices to be cultivated. Attention is performative and
situational; as such, we make the argument that designing and implementing new
choreographies of attention should be central to building sustainable models for
knowledge production and dissemination in the contemporary academy.
We begin with the example of the lecture. Conventionally understood, the lecture is a
primary mechanism for knowledge delivery in the academy. The lecture is also a piece
of sited work where typically a speaker stands in the front of a room and shares his
or her thoughts in speech (ideally) with an attentive audience. Many of the standard
conventions for organizing attention at a lecture are clear: the audience is seated,
often in rows, facing forward toward the speaker, and the speaker stands, often
behind a podium, facing the audience. Opportunities to talk, and their regulation,
are primarily the responsibility of the speaker. The audience is responsible to
attend and remain attentive. Checking email, watching TV, sleeping, or knitting do
not, in most circumstances, provide acceptable outward manifestations of appropriate
attention. If an audience member is not looking at the speaker, the designated
presentation screen, or some other point in the room that can reasonably be
incorporated into paying attention,
then they appear — and are available to
the speakers and others as being — distracted.
In a famous paper on the topic, the sociologist Erving Goffman suggests that the
order and organization of the lecture is built around a specific, situated management
of the tension between maintaining an audience’s attention and exploiting their
proneness to distraction. According to Goffman, the lecture belongs to that broad class of situational
enterprises wherein a difference clearly occurs between game and spectacle,
that is, between the business at hand and the custard of interaction in which
the business is embedded
business
of the lecture is
the subject matter (e.g., Paleolithic history, or recent innovations in gene-splicing
technology), then the custard of interaction
is all the conventional work that goes into organizing and staging the event (the
arrangement of the room and its furnishings, the pre-lecture conversations, the
formal beginning and introductions, the transitions to questions, the closing, the
informal talk afterward, etc.) Goffman’s contention is that, in comparison to other
live performances like a stage play or a ballet, the lecture typically aspires to
diminish attention to the staging and organization and direct the audience toward a
focus on the subject matter itself. In this sense, the lecture is a form of
organization that seeks to hold its staging and its overtly performative elements in
check so as to provide more extensive access to the topic. While Goffman is clear
that audiences nevertheless constantly direct their attention to elements of the
surrounding environment, he suggests that the social and physical site of the lecture
is structured in such a way that enforces audiences to act as if
they were
engaged directly with the subject matter. Ask an audience member whether a lecture
was any good or not, and it is far more likely they would say something about the
flow of ideas than the shape of the podium or the choreography of the event. And yet,
who was there, whether the speaker was engaging, whether the event began and ended on
time, and so on, are all matters about which, having attended a lecture, one might be
expected to comment. Even as the unique organization of the lecture places what
was said by the speaker
at center stage, the custard of interaction
is also deeply woven into our attention to the
event. This is so even at the level of our undistracted
listening. As Goffman
argues, the audience skips along, dipping in and out of
following the lecturer’s argument, waiting for the special effects which
actually capture them, and topple them momentarily into what is being
said
special effects
might be a good
opening joke, an interesting aside, an evocative turn of phrase, or a moment of
clarity in an otherwise abstruse topic that transports the audience members from
their natural state of distraction toward a focus on the topic-at-hand.
On this analysis, the fact that minds wander, that they are influenced by the myriad interactions that make up any situation, that they are curious as to whether everyone in the audience is as confused as they are, are phenomena that are strategically suppressed in and through the conventional organization of the lecture. Not only does the audience have direct access to the lecturer, but the lecturer, in turn, has access to the audience and their expressions, and is able to work with that texture of attention in a variety of ways during the lecture’s course. Goffman’s analysis is focused in part on the sorts of special, rhetorical effects that speakers can use to draw an audience in, and he considers as well that audience members communicate constantly with one another, through, for instance, smiles or unsettled glances between two people, the shifting in chairs that takes place when an audience collectively expects the talk to be over, or the quiet contemplation during a particularly riveting moment. While most of these interactions are muted by the interior design of the lecture hall itself — the horizontal rows of chairs facing the speaker, and the presentation screen front and center — that same organization focuses the predominant flow of attention and attentional monitoring between speaker and audience. Given the centrality of these conventional performative elements to the actual conduct and success of these events, it may seem odd that lecturers, lecture planners, and audiences, continue to conduct their activities in apparent and determined indifference to the lecture’s rather unique performative conventions and associated structures of attention. Indeed, we might speculate that the hesitancy on the part of some academics to integrate emerging media into their pedagogical practice is part of a larger hesitancy to consider these performative conventions as central to their craft as educators.
And yet, it is easy to imagine that if the room’s design were different (both physically and informationally), the interactions prompted by the audience’s natural condition — distraction — would become more central.
It is our contention that the presence of laptops and other networked devices within
live
academic events changes the texture, flow, and distribution of
attention, and that this change in the practical order of these events therefore
requires a rethinking and a redesign of how they are organized and performed. Richard
Lanham makes the argument that the ability to summon and maintain attention is the
most valuable commodity in contemporary digital culture the economy of
attention
is premised on the idea that all of the elements that comprise a
situation — its business as well as its custard — are in the process of being
reorganized by the emerging media and an underlying economy that privileges
fluff
over stuff.
In this new economy,
Lanham argues, the most valuable
commodity is not the stuff we think we’re trading, but is instead the fluff that
surrounds it — that organization, and architecture, and those rhetorical effects that
direct our attention and help us make sense of the stuff. In the context of the
present argument, this would mean that the organizational and performative elements
that comprise Goffman’s custard
would move to the foreground, and the work of choreography would occupy a different,
more privileged place in our thinking about, and planning for, live
academic
events. But Lanham goes a step further and argues that fluff does not simply support
stuff (i.e. the advertisement does not simply support the product), but the fluff
itself becomes the commodity. On this argument, the ability to shape people’s
attention is now a more valuable commodity than the things around which our attention
is presumably focused. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Lanham recounts,
the world of stuff has gradually come
to dominate the university curriculum.
Science and business education —
the study of stuff whose outcomes are assessable — have set the agenda for the modern
university education. But to the extent that we now live in an
information economy…this relationship must invert
special effects
become more focal to
the conduct of interaction. These organizational and rhetorical elements become the
fundamental mechanism of trade, the primary determinant of value, in a society where
information-flows, perhaps even more than material structures, determine the
parameters of every situation. Attention, diffused and de-centered, is the focal
value of this new economy in which the force of symbols, rhetoric, and information
design are displacing an order of industry and manufacture. The work of this
The economist Richard Thaler, together with the lawyer Cass Sunstein, provide
direction for work in this area through the concept of what they term choice architecture
It turns
out,
they conclude, that if you give men a target, they
can’t help but aim at it
problem
of laptops in the classroom. Indeed, these additional
information channels can provide endless opportunities for mental and visual
wandering, but if considered part of the learning space, and designed to provide
subtle encouragement towards particular modes of participation, than these digital
distractions
can in fact provide positive wayfinding tools for the
productive integration of physical and digital spaces.
Every situation is composed of both the physical architecture and the
information-flows that accompany that architecture
Our study focuses on the design and evaluation of these emergent choreographies of
attention. We assembled a suite of digital backchannels — including chatrooms, web
links, virtual environments, and archives, and then directed the audience toward
their use, thus altering the traditional economy of attention toward a more
decentered experience where the interactions among audience members were integrated
into the situation’s overall meaning. When backchannels are successfully implemented,
the parameters of the lecturer’s work must, in turn, expand to take account of the
user practices that are part of the overall composition of the event. Therefore, the
periphery of the situation is centralized for the individual user, transforming what
is typically referred to as
Backchannels are nothing particularly new. Multi-user chat systems have been in
relatively wide use since the late 1980s with the invention of Internet relay chat
(IRC). Of course in the 1980s, these systems were primarily used for individuals
spread out over the Internet to congregate in a digital space for conversation. IRC
was essentially limited to non-spatially proximate desktop computers. But with the
introduction of laptops and wi-fi technology, the potential applications of IRC
expanded. It could be used at conferences, in classrooms, or any place that people
assemble around wi-fi connectivity. And of course these backchannels were no longer
limited to IRC – instant messaging, text messaging, virtual worlds, Facebook,
Twitter, and many other social web applications expanded the potential uses and
contexts of backchannels. While these applications and their corresponding practices
are commonly implemented in some industry sectors (i.e. technology conferences),
outside of very specialized disciplines and institutions, the deliberate
implementation of backchannels is still relatively uncommon in the academy, even
though wi-fi connectivity is nearly ubiquitous at most research institutions and
students and faculty are now continuously connected to the global network. In 2007,
two thirds of U.S. college classrooms were wireless
In February of 2008, we conducted an early experiment during a day-long symposium entitled
Instead of parallel rows of chairs, we had the audience sit around large, round banquet tables. This spatial organization was meant to disrupt the standard front-and-center focus of the room even before the addition of digital backchannels. Before the panels began, people were not necessarily training their gaze to the front of the room. Conversations took place between and across tables; people brought out laptops and began working on them, even if their backs were facing the front of the room. Walking into that room felt like walking into an active work environment. Simply reorienting audience bodies and their corresponding technologies altered the fundamental nature of the learning space.
This physical set-up provided a good context for introducing digital backchannels. We
built a tool that aggregated feeds from Delicious, the social bookmarking site, and Flickr, the photo sharing site; it also
included a video feed, a space in Second Life and an open source question tool called
backchan.nl (http://backchan.nl)
This experiment reinforced our assumption that
With that said, we disagree with the assertions that laptops necessarily take one off
topic and limit critical thinking. David Cole argues, I am sure that the Internet can be a
useful pedagogical tool in some settings and for some subjects. But for most
classes, it is little more than an attractive nuisance.
While some people were conversing about what was just said, drawing each other’s
attention to relevant websites and applications, some never bothered with the
channels provided, choosing instead to only check email or engage in IM chats. Some
users commented that they couldn’t follow what was going on in the digital space;
that they needed more structure to get them to participate. And others suggested that
providing these channels crippled the participatory capabilities of those without
laptops, making the un-connected participant feel left out of the conversation. The
successful choreography of attention, therefore,
Another element that fell short in our experiment was the frequency with which the moderator addressed the backchannel conversations. The impression of digital integration for those without laptops is enhanced when questions and statements streaming from backchannels are explicitly referenced. In essence, the goal is to cycle through the backchannel participation as if it is just another piece of the content. This is the strategy used on
liveacademic event; even if not participating with a laptop, integrating the participation of others into the subject of the event, is the challenge and promise of the this new economy of attention.
Based on our experiment, we cannot point to absolute findings, but we can point to a
need for further investigation and experimentation in this arena. As colleges and
universities debate their laptop and network policies, as they build new classrooms
and libraries, they need to consider how this new economy is altering the nature of
academic space. They need to consider the correspondences between physical and
networked spaces and their influence on how attention is formulated, captured, and
purposed towards the goals of teaching and learning. This will happen as more and
more committed faculty and institutions explore these considerations as central
elements of intellectual and pedagogical practice. The goal is not simply to resist
the literature and policies that take a hard line stance against personal
technologies in the classroom – attention diverted is attention
diverted
This research was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.