The weave of collective attention

 

Wassily Kandinsky - Lyrisch (Lyrical)

In this NY Times article, authors  D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt, who make up the Friends of Attention Collective, write about the importance of our dwindling attention span.  They reference Jenny Odell and claim that the improvement of attention is at the heart of improving democracy.  They talk about at "instrument" of attention ([participants] "guided by a commitment to themselves as a sensitive attentional instrument") They share an illustrative example of how they're helping their students improve it.

The curriculum we have developed takes on a challenge that so many of us face: how to create, beyond the confines of our personalized digital universes, something resembling a shared world.

It starts with experience, both individual and collective, with a focus on students’ self-conscious and self-aware experiences of reading, observing, reflecting and problem-solving. Consider a simple exercise known as “Attention in Place,” inspired by the work of the experimental writer Georges Perec. For his short work, “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris,” Mr. Perec sat at a corner cafe in his beloved city and over the course of three days recorded everything he saw, with particular attention to the supposedly mundane (what he called “infra-ordinary”) events that might under normal circumstances have gone unnoted.

In our much shorter exercise, after reading an excerpt from Mr. Perec’s work, participants head out into the neighborhood and spend 30 minutes jotting down their observations of absolutely whatever unfolds in the world around them. Upon returning to the group, we sit in a circle and read one line each, consecutively, from these newfound observations.

Sounds so simple! But the results are very close to miraculous: A common ground is rediscovered in the weave of collective attention. What I saw, you heard; the breeze that you felt passed my corner as well. A joint song of place unfolds, and with it a giddy, collective sense that the world is ours. The first-person plural becomes real, and the dynamics of attention are revealed as the choreography of our individual beings in shared time and space.