BYUH professor and two students talk about intention, agency and discipline in an age of fragmented attention
In a world that offers endless sources of wonder and awe, simply cruising through the roads without paying attention to life’s details and textures—a tree’s unique bark pattern, the earthly scent of rain on dry soil, the music of rustling leaves—robs one of “what’s so amazing about being a human with a brain,” said Mason Allred, associate professor in the Faculty of Arts & Letters.
Attention is a currency, Allred said. Billions of dollars are expensed, top specialists are employed and ethical boundaries are pushed to capture and keep people’s attention, Allred added. The problem, he emphasized, is people have collectively agreed it is normal for our consciousness to be pushed around and pulled in hundreds of different directions. “If you care about being a critical, smart thinker or a disciple of Christ, you definitely need to retain and control your attention more so you can direct it in intentional ways,” he stressed.
Shallow, scattered presence
Toggling between four different apps, scrolling without knowing when to stop, searching constantly for fast, easy gratifications—these are what Allred described as “hollow mechanical repetitions” that characterize poor attention. It is our presence getting scattered thoughtlessly into different places; it is our brain slipping through our fingers. “So, we have to then consider how much we should be actually doing. How much should we consume? And where would that limit be to actually have the most positive effects out of a negative situation?” he said.
Lovely Therese Coronel, a sophomore in communication, media and culture from the Philippines, said she noticed the dwindling of her attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Normalcy took on a different form, routines changed and people’s only access to the outside world was through digital images on their screens. “I shifted from waking up early and doing productive things to just always looking for things that can stimulate me immediately,” she shared. With accelerated digitalization during the pandemic, she said she got used to seeing endless fonts of stimuli wherever the Internet
brought her.
Paula Graciella Butones, a senior in psychology from the Philippines, shared the same experience. “We saw the rise of short-form content, like TikTok and Instagram reels, that rewards us without having to exert significant effort,” she said. Moreover, she said the living conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive increase in multitasking. “I thought I could be productive by doing many things all at once, but I realized dividing my attention only limits me to the surface level of these tasks,” she shared.
When asked to describe fragmented attention, Allred said “It’s like jet skiing across the top and never scuba diving.” As an educator, he said he believes in the value of sitting down and thinking deeply. The loss of interest in the ability to understand, he continued, is a tragedy that strips people’s lives of depth, detail and individuality. “I believe in a God who has consumed all media ever created and will ever be created … I don’t think we’re expected to do that, though. I don’t think our brain can handle it, so I can’t fully buy the argument that it’s good to just keep as much as you can take in,” he shared.
There is a huge difference, he emphasized, between passively consuming short-form media and taking one’s time with longform content, especially those with narratives. “We, as humans, still are the type of beings that resonate with stories to connect with others,” he said. If there is one thing that consistently moves people to rally together under their common humanity, it would be their passion for telling stories, he said. “You tend to feel healthier consuming something where someone put in the time and thought to actually spin out a story to it … The longer form tends to have much more fulfillment to it,” he shared.
We, as humans, still are the type of beings that resonate with stories to connect with others.
Attention as a commodity
The attention economy, Allred said, is a huge industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars every year. When society is pervaded by systems that subject human experiences to capital, he said people’s ability to feel rooted and connected to the earth is undermined. “When you turn [attention] into a commodity to be bought and sold, you alienate people from their attention. It becomes this product that can be picked up and pushed around in other ways,” he explained.
For Coronel, letting capitalistic structures dictate where her attention goes without question is as good as surrendering her whole life to their ploys. “The risk is it’s not just our attention that’s being commodified. It’s our time. And our time is our life. So if we just give that away, it’s not just attention we’re losing,” she explained.
Meanwhile, for Butones, the ecosystem designed by tech empires—one where attention is grabbed, held as long as possible and sold to advertisers—is an infertile land that cannot sustain human relationships and empathy. “You need to connect with a person to understand how they’re feeling. But if your attention is divided, you don’t have enough focus and presence to do that. You might lose the ability to connect and empathize,” she explained.
According to Allred, the shift towards fragmented attention amid the digital age has also been gradually eroding the perceived value of hard-won wisdom. “The biggest thing right now is as soon as you have to spend attention on something longer than a couple minutes, it just seems to get outsourced to AI. That’s the biggest temptation for most students now,” he explained. Outsourcing one’s cognitive capacities to AI and justifying it as efficiency is the very mindset sold by capitalism, Allred stressed.
Piecing it back together
Many people find it difficult to completely disengage themselves from media, Allred said, so extreme methods can yield better results. He emphasized intention, discipline, mindfulness and variety both in content and medium. “It’s almost like if you know four different languages and you only ever speak one, the others are just atrophying,” he said. “So vary your media, be deliberate, try to enjoy it, actually get something out of it.” Crafting a plan, understanding the purpose and sticking to it, he said, can help people reclaim their focus.
“Do I keep going or not?” is the decision Coronel said she always makes whenever she catches herself getting lost in mindless scrolling. “That’s why I’m retraining myself to be more intentional with my time by setting limits,” she shared. She said she sets up timers, thoroughly plans her day and establishes a clear schedule to know where everything fits.
You want to spend your money on things that will benefit you, right? So it’s the same with attention. You should invest it in things that will give you returns.
Meanwhile, Butones emphasized the brain’s incredible plasticity. She said people can engage several brain systems to carve new neural pathways and retrain attention. “You can mold your brain. You can train it by experience,” she said. She stressed the importance of establishing habits that can dislodge people from the grasps of media. “I physically put my devices away, I plan and divide my time into blocks. I make it harder for me to get my hands on the things that distract me,” she shared.