A popular topic in literacy studies (as well as in economics, advertising, neuroscience and psychology) is that of the “economics of attention.” That is: the study of how attention is valued and in some cases, how we can attract and even market it. Professor of Computer Science, Herbert A. Simon, first developed the idea of Attention Economics in 1971, when he said: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Basically, if I have too much information, I’m going to need to find a way to parse through it all—and that’s where attention comes in. As cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene writes, “attention acts as an amplifier and a selective filter.” The study of attentional economics asks: what do consumers, learners, workers pay attention to? How do they filter out the noise?
Literacy studies took on the idea of the economics of attention in 1994, when Richard Lanham (addressing a librarians' conference on technology) famously said “if one is looking for a glimpse of what literacy will look like in the future, the fighter cockpit is a good place to look.” By this, he meant the literacy learner would be fighting off countless imposing distractions coming at them from all directions, while they tried, perhaps futilely, to concentrate on the task at hand. This is an interesting and somewhat useful metaphor, (I reference it in my forthcoming chapter "The Politics of Paying Attention: Literacy Learning in the Era of Covid" ) but, like a lot of discussions of attentional economics, it falls a bit short in that it fails to ask a key question: how did the learner get in the fighter cockpit in the first place? Who (or what system) put them there?
What I’m trying to get at is this: attention is not a singular action undertaken by one individual who decides of their own accord to “pay attention” and then just obediently does so. Attention is a complex transaction that emerges from a relationship between the agent, the environment and the situation in which the act of paying attention is taking place. And furthermore, we often conflate the performance of attention with actually paying attention. In other words, the economics of attention—who gets credit for paying attention, and who gets taught to pay attention and to perform attention in ways that are socially valued are highly politically charged processes.
Likewise, labelling people, like students and workers, as “failing” to pay attention due to appearance (looking distracted or bored, for example) is also highly political, and frankly, often racially charged. I have said this before, and I’ll say it again. I can not say it enough times: there is no posture that belies attention. You can't tell from looking at a person whether they are paying attention to you or not (no, not even if they’re on their phone! They could be looking up a vocabulary word, looking at the class website, texting a friend in the class). The posture of paying attention is a learned behavior that has almost nothing at all to do with the act of paying attention and everything to do with playing the part. When I talk about the "politics of paying attention," I am acknowledging that some people's performances of attention are valued more highly than others, and I am questioning why this is so.
The mechanisms behind actually paying attention are far too complex to explain in detail here, but they involve (very basically) taking in information in order to be able to remember it and use it at a later date. Which attentional skills are valued in power-heavy situations like school, as well as how these skills are taught is also uneven and politically charged. To pay attention “properly”, you need to know first when to pay attention (is this just friendly banter with the professor, or important information? It is impossible to pay rapt attention throughout a two hour class period. How do we know the cues for the most important moments?) and then, you need to know what to pay attention to. That is, attention is a filtering mechanism, but how do we know what to filter? Students whose parents went to college are often taught, either implicitly or explicitly what is signal and what is noise in both text and verbal academic discourse. A person trying to attend also needs to know how to make the object of their attention stick, usually by relating it to something they already know or relating it to personal experience. None of this, of course, takes into account the also-complicated processes of filtering out other distractions like pain, heartache, despair, worry, trauma and so on.
In other words, attention is complex and it is learned. Also, importantly, it is not just an individual act, but a relationship between the agent (student) the environment (both the classroom culture and home culture) and the situation (the moment the literacy act is taking place). Those who haven’t been implicitly or explicitly taught academic attention structures are at a disadvantage—at least with the expectations we currently place on student attention.
What is extremely important to consider going forward is that everyone has attentional strengths, though these may not yet be valued in academic or work situations. Being able to respond quickly and briefly (as in text messages) or being able to banter or spontaneously “spit bars” are just a few off-the-cuff examples of overlooked attentional strengths. Yes, educators can, and probably should explicitly teach the attentional skills we already expect. But we should also look for value in the attentional strengths students already have, and learn to expand our expectations.
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