A ‘Radical’ Approach to Reclaiming Your Attention
To enter the Strother School of Radical Attention, you have to walk through what has come to be known as “influencer alley.” Any time of day or night, dozens of people will be standing along this brick-paved part of Brooklyn, snapping the same Instagram photo with the Manhattan Bridge and East River in the background. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it struck me as a little funny while I headed to a course about unraveling the coercive powers of social media, phones, and digital life.
That class, “How to Build an Attention Sanctuary,” was a six-week workshop focused on teaching parents and other caretakers how to “rediscover the joy of undivided attention” and help their family do the same. The problem this description gestures at is broadly familiar by now: A lot of people view fractured attention, caused by omnipresent technology, as a primary trouble of our times. This fracturing makes them feel anxious, depressed, disconnected from one another and from reality.
The narrative that digital technology has produced a new kind of alienation and distraction has been popularized in recent years in best-selling books such as Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and buzzy documentaries such as Netflix’s The Social Dilemma. But where parenting is concerned, the issue feels especially urgent, as young people struggle with a rise in mental-health problems that some have blamed on social media and screen time. Some parents also worry that their kids, even if they avoid the worst negative outcomes, are growing up without the urge to play outside or read for fun or do other abstract but important-seeming things, such as making stuff up in their head, to fend off boredom.
I was attracted to the class, despite not having any children, because I am interested in the idea that our devices have become obstacles in the pursuit of a fulfilling life—and I wanted to know more about what a “radical” change might look like. The Strother School of Radical Attention, or SORA, is obviously offering a niche product for a very specific milieu (I learned about it from the Instagram Story of a professional book critic who lives in New York; it cost $560), but it is also part of a bigger picture. For years and years, people have regretted the time and autonomy they’ve lost to their phone—the time and autonomy that their children will lose.
Is there actually a problem that “radical attention” can solve? I enrolled to find out.
SORA is really just one room on the seventh floor of a basic commercial building. It’s cozy: Trains rumble past the windows; wine bottles are repurposed as vases; a bookshelf offers a mix of reportage on the tech industry and creative nonfiction about spirituality and interior life (John Carreyrou’s book about the downfall of Theranos, Simone Weil’s Waiting for God).
The school is part of a nonprofit organization called the Institute for Sustained Attention and was founded by a group (“collective”) of people who call themselves the Friends of Attention, borrowing from the Quakers. A year ago, some of them wrote a New York Times opinion article that repeatedly compares the “extractive profit models” of Big Tech to fracking and invokes Rousseau’s social contract: “Our attention is born free, but is, increasingly, everywhere in chains.” In other materials, the school’s creators describe themselves as attention activists. (They have published a Manifesto for the Freedom of Attention.)
The class was led by Jac Mullen, a New Haven, Connecticut, public-school teacher and writer. My classmates were a small group of very kind people in their 30s and 40s, most of them raising young children in the same generally affluent area of Brooklyn. An English teacher from a wealthy neighborhood in Manhattan was the only parent of a teenager. We spent much of the first class saying why we were there. The English teacher said she was at a loss after seeing kids get worse at reading and other basic skills each year. “This is the only place I’ve found that seems focused on this change,” she said. The others feared the example they were setting for their kids with their doomscrolling and craned necks. I said my job is to stare at a computer all day and receive Slack messages, which I fear is programming me to focus only in 20-second intervals.
[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]
We started with our own childhoods and searched for answers there. Mullen pressed us to remember the “attentional values” we had learned as children, back when the world was gloriously boring. What had our minds been like? Where did they wander? I talked about sitting in Sunday school; the English teacher talked about sitting in a car.
It reminded me of a trend I’ve noticed on TikTok the past few years. People will post a video of a window on a rainy day and say something about how, when they were kids, they would watch raindrops “race” down the glass or “eat” each other when they crossed paths, for lack of anything better to do, and their minds would wander. (I did this too.) They long for these times, they say, as they post about them on TikTok.
Most weeks, the class involved some kind of group activity. One night we paired up for a “world-giving” walk, in which we wandered the surrounding area while describing what we were seeing and asking each other questions about it. On another, we watched two of our classmates use their phones for five minutes and then tried to guess what they had been doing. We spent nearly two hours one week looking at and then discussing a nearby giant sculpture of a baby’s head. (For this, we followed, mysteriously, instructions written by “Order of the Third Bird,” in reference to a story by Pliny the Elder.)
There were also exercises for us to complete. On the first day, we received a homework assignment to conduct a “household attention audit.” Throughout the week, we were to jot down whenever we observed ourselves or a family member “deeply absorbed in their device,” as well as times that we experienced strong connection and tech-free moments. We were also supposed to notice the spaces where these things were happening: the living room, the subway, a park. The goal was to start to develop “a basic meta-attentional awareness”—to notice when our attention was moving from one thing to another and why.
I wrote down that I was annoyed with my boyfriend when he texted while we were walking together, and that I felt a strong connection to him while watching baseball together. As far as our living space, well, our bedroom doesn’t have a TV, so that’s good—but we plug our phones in on our nightstands, so maybe that’s bad. When a worksheet asked me to think about “specific changes” I could make to improve my family’s “attention ecology,” I worried that there was not much to be done. (Leave our laptops outside the front door at the end of the workday?) But I was hopeful. I came up with some little ideas, such as “no reaching for my phone before coffee” and “no taking my phone with me to the lunchroom at work.”
Those adjustments were easy, so for my next homework assignment, I wrote boldly about my truer desires, which embarrassed me to articulate, because they were real. I wanted to be more patient. I didn’t want to dismiss things out of hand as boring just because I was having a hard time concentrating. I didn’t want to waste my time watching the stupidest videos ever made just because they’re there. Mullen asked us to imagine what our lives would be like at the end of the course and write a diary entry from the future. “I am happy to be alone with my thoughts or together in conversation with other people,” I wrote, covering the page with my arm like a middle schooler.
More than activities and worksheets, though, the classes were anchored by short lectures followed by group discussions. “I feel a little like Al Gore walking around with a growing slideshow,” Mullen joked when he started his presentation one week. “This is as important as climate change.”
[Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now]
That day, he walked us through an emerging field of study called “parental technoference,” spending some time on recently published spin-offs of the famous “Still Face” experiments conducted by the child psychologist Ed Tronick in the 1970s. The original experiments showed that infants will try to engage their parents by babbling, laughing, waving, and so forth, and that they become frantic and disturbed when their parents react with a stony expression.
The updated versions involve tests in which parents are distracted by their phone. The idea is that modern parents have “still” faces fairly often, which could be detrimental to their children’s emotional development. This made for lively discussion, though not of the potential or limitations of the research itself. Again, we talked about our lives and the small things that we wanted to be different.
Adam Pearce, a writer and life coach who helped instruct the class, talked about teaching his kids that phones are tools to be used for specific purposes. He was thinking about buying extra phone chargers and placing them throughout the home. In each room, the phone would have its own house. This way, the phone would be out of sight and out of reach, while staying charged. The effect would be helped by adding some ritual, such as shouting, “The phone is going home!” or doing a choreographed dance.
This seemed ridiculous but promising. It reminded everyone of the archaic idea of the “computer room”: that things were better when the computer had one room, instead of being everywhere. I didn’t disagree, but I was a little frustrated. If this was as important as climate change, as Mullen said, why did we keep talking about things that felt so small?
Before I started the class, I wondered what a truly radical approach to personal technology would be. Would we be encouraged to throw our smartphones away, at a minimum, and maybe even quit our laptop jobs and dedicate our free time to data-poisoning and blowing up cell towers?
The course’s answer was what I feared it would be: What you can mostly do, if you have the time and the resources, is snatch back some small pieces of territory along the edges. No phone before coffee. Consider a statue. Don’t let the baby watch Cocomelon. (I saw my first clip from the show in the class and regretted it.) Try a little harder and be a little better. At times, we spoke of “relapse,” as if we were in some kind of Anonymous program.
The final week of class took place just after the presidential election. Only one other classmate and I showed up. The rest were busy or had had enough. Our first task was to write down the answers to a few questions, which served to summarize the previous weeks: “How do you build an attention sanctuary?” and “Have we always needed attention sanctuaries? Or is there something specific about right now?” I struggled. I still don’t know how to build an attention sanctuary; I also don’t know how people lived in other times. Who cares if I look at my phone too much anyway? Mullen didn’t take offense. “‘Attention sanctuary’ is a very precious name; there’s no getting around it,” he allowed. “I never liked the name.”
[Read: The end of high-school English]
Then he moved on. I was surprised again when, with 45 minutes left in the course, Mullen’s presentation took a turn toward the hard-core. “What’s happening to us?” he asked sharply. He hustled through an explanation of Shoshana Zuboff’s popular concept of “surveillance capitalism,” which articulates that personal data have been turned into a wildly profitable product by the giant tech companies. Following the same logical trajectory that many tech critics have taken, Mullen arrived at the end point of artificial intelligence: All of this data extraction has been in the service of that huge goal, but they never told us. We wrote all over the internet and then the internet was scraped. Our brains created the neural nets and we just thought we were living our lives. The room got quiet and sad—omnipotent AI was a horse of a different color. You can’t simply make a tiny bed for it in another room.
The course, like the broader issues it aimed to address, created a lot of big feelings that the few of us remaining did not seem to know what to do with. We began from a place of concern and ended there, as well. Mullen told us that he had been experimenting with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for a while. When he projected his laptop screen onto the wall, we could see that his computer held dozens of saved chats. “The future leaks backward through the cracks,” Claude said in the one he pulled up. Mullen told us he was afraid that chatbots would “fuck kids up” majorly and that people might start worshipping AI models like gods. We all agreed. And then we went home.