Slow Digest: Attention Activism

This week’s edition of Slow Digest is written by C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee N. Pritchard.

As an elder Millennial, I had the privilege of straddling both an analog and digital world. I remember using card catalogs and pay phones and recording mixed tapes from songs on the radio. I also remember the awe of iPods, the first ping of “You’ve Got Mail!” and being amongst the first college students on Facebook. I carry both the excitement of that newly minted digital age and nostalgia for what it replaced: the silence of the analog age, when it was easier to direct my attention and get lost in time. 

In this digital age, our attention is co-opted by an attention economy that seeks to monetize and exploit our attention for economic gain. Our attention is fractured by digital distractions and mislabeled as productivity. But what does it really mean to pay attention in a world built to distract us? What does it look like when we are intentional about our attention? 

Attention activism seeks to answer these questions.

What is attention activism?

According to the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA), attention activism is “the movement to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies.” This movement is about the reclamation of our ability to choose and direct our focus for personal and collective flourishing. SoRA does this through study (collaborative inquiry), organizing (coalition-building), and sanctuary (cultivating spaces and times that provide shelter and nourishment for attentional capacities). 

Back in May 2025, C21 sponsored one of the organization’s workshops that explored some important questions: 

  • How might our capacity for sustained attention affect how we see each other and our city?
  • How might these perceptions lead to actions that reshape our respective communities and environments? 
  • What happens when we get quiet, stay still, and take it all in? Do we miss the world beyond the screen?  

SoRA facilitators led participants though an “Attention Lab” and “Sidewalk Study,” what they call attention cultivation workshops where participants practice radical attention. They spent time focusing on themselves, their environments, and their communities.

This framing of attention as a shared practice, rather than a private struggle, is at the heart of attention activism. To understand why it matters, however, we first need to examine this myth of multitasking and the effect of the digital world on our brains.

The Myth of Multitasking

We live in a culture that praises busyness, where toggling between email, Zoom calls, Word docs, spreadsheets, and all of the above is celebrated as efficiency. According to the American Psychological Association (2006), doing more than one complex task at a time takes a toll on productivity. What we call multitasking is actually rapid task-switching, and every switch comes with a cognitive cost. Studies show that our brains slow down, make more errors, and burn more energy when we try to juggle tasks.

Clifford Nass (2013), a psychology professor and author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, says the same thing: “People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted…So they’re pretty much mental wrecks…[but] they actually think they’re more productive.”  

As a chronic high-achieving multitasker who’s finally fizzled out, I realize that this myth of multitasking played a role in my brain slowing down. Our brains are built for depth, not constant reorientation or switching from task to task. Attention activism pushes back against this myth of multitasking. It means choosing a single task and giving that one task the dignity of our full awareness. 

The Digital World and Our Brains

Notifications, infinite scrolls, and the dopamine hit of a “like” are all part of an attention economy where our focus is the product being sold. We aren’t the customers but the currency. Nicolas Carr (2010) explains that the internet is an interrupting system, a machine designed to splinter our thoughts in a hundred different directions all at once. Our brains adapt to this environment in ways that make it harder to resist. Every ping trains us to crave novelty. Every scroll reshapes our reward system, shortening our tolerance for boredom and silence. 

I notice it in myself whenever I try to read a book for more than 20 minutes without checking my phone. I used to be the kid who got lost in books, not looking up for hours at a time. Last year, I wrote about my pledge to practice Slow Reading. In that post, I referenced Maryanne Wolf, an expert in the science of reading and the author of Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. She explains that reading is about discipline and training our brains not only to pay attention but to read at the book’s pace. My practice of slow reading sometimes feels like a losing battle because my mind reaches for distraction, as if that stillness of reading is uncomfortable. 

Both Wolf and Carr argue that the Internet rewires our brains, encouraging rapid scanning and shallow engagement at the expense of deep, reflective thought. While we might gain efficiency and connectivity, we lose the capacity for sustained focus, memory, and critical thinking, the very skills that allow us to understand, create, and fully inhabit the world around us. That’s the effect of the digital world on our brains. 

The story of attention isn’t just about the loss of our ability to deeply focus on a single object, event, or thought however. Anthropologists Suzanne Gaskins and Ruth Paradise (2010) remind us that not all cultures define attention as narrow concentration. In American Indigenous communities, children often participate in observational learning and what they call open attention, a broad and inclusive style of awareness that allows them take in information from their entire environmental context rather than focusing on a single stimulus. Open attention fosters presence. It trains the mind to be receptive, flexible, and attuned, rather than scattered. This distinction matters, as attention activism is not about forcing ourselves into rigid focus, but about recovering this older, more humane way of noticing our physical and social environments. 

Toward Attention Activism

In this practice of reclaiming our overstimulated brains and nervous systems from the digital technologies engineered to fracture them and possibly move more towards a practice of open attention, attention activism asks us to re-learn what it means to linger, to dwell, and to be fully present. 

Being fully present is not about the nostalgia for the analog age; it’s about reclaiming choice in how we spend one of our most precious and limited resources: our focus. To pay attention with intention is to resist the attention economy, the myth of multitasking, and those daily digital distractions. It is about building and preserving attention sanctuaries that cultivate stillness, rest, and attentional freedom. 

The Friends of Attention, in their Twelve Theses of Attention, write: “True attention takes the unlivable and makes it livable. It is a lung that replenishes the air it breathes. If suddenly you feel that you can live and breathe in the place where you are, you or someone around you has committed, enacted, or bestowed attention. This is our work.”

Attention activism doesn’t have to start with a radical attention workshop. It can be as simple as turning off notifications, practicing slow reading, or carving out time for stillness to actively notice the world around us. 

If you are interested in radical attention events, however, listed below are C21’s upcoming Story Cart: Attention events: 

For more resources about attention activism, check this Slow Digest post from past graduate fellow Russell Star-Lack. 

References

American Psychological Association. (2020). Multitasking: Switching costs. https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking

Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. W. W. Norton & Company.

Gaskins, S., & Paradise, R. (2010). Learning Through Observation in Daily Life. In Strother School of Radical Attention (Ed.), Attention Activism Reader (pp. 22-26). SoRA.

NPR. (2013). The Myth of Multitasking. https://www.npr.org/2013/05/10/182861382/the-myth-of-multitasking

Friends of Attention. (2019). Twelve Theses on Attention. https://www.friendsofattention.net/documents/12theses

Recommendation for Further Reading 

The Dallergut Dream Department Store by Miye Lee, translated by Sandy Joosun Lee:  Humans spend nearly a third of our lives asleep. In those hours, dreams can become portraits of the subconscious. They help us process emotions, resolve tensions, and reframe the challenges of our waking lives. Lee’s novel imagines dreams as carefully crafted commodities, reminding us of the vital and mysterious nature of this often-overlooked form of attention.