Tag Archives: attention

Manipulation and Engagement

Spend an hour and a half watching Social Dilemma on Netflix.

The section on fake news about an hour into the show is truly alarming. Fake news travels 6 times faster and further on Twitter than real news. Think about that as a battle against or for Truth. It’s an unfair fight.

Polarization is growing because polarized messages feed the attention algorithms better than centrist views and ideas.

Your social media feed isn’t designed to give you what others get, it’s catered to keep your attention. Your attention is the product. Social media sites vie for that attention and then sell it to the highest bidder… and the highest bidders are not just shoe companies and consumables, the highest bidders are wanting to influence the next video you see, and the next idea that moves your thinking where they want.

If you use social media, you are not in control of your own attention.

Attention in online delivery of classes

There are some pretty funny and creative ways that students are avoiding class now that it is online. Here are some fun examples:

1. A video of a student using a video of himself on his phone, ‘paying attention’, set up with a tripod in front of his laptop’s camera.

2. This kid has different priorities:

3. And Zach, who is known for his video magic, has fun with Wi-Fi challenges.

All joking aside, it’s harder to hold a group’s attention for too long in an online setting, compared to having a ‘captive audience’ face to face. It becomes a matter of thinking this through thoughtfully, or literally ‘losing your audience’. Remember Bill Nye The Science Guy? I don’t think he ran any segment of his show for longer than 3 minutes. There were quick lessons interspersed with flashy examples and experiments. Compare that to a 40 minute lecture with a teacher, and compare that to a 40 minute lesson online?

Here are two simple questions to ask:

1. What is being done to engage the learner?

2. What is the learner’s experience?

I’m not saying we need to entertain like Bill Nye, but I am saying that if we don’t think of the end user’s experience, we are going to see our audience’s attention dwindle.

Notifications are interruptions

For the past few months I’ve been turning off most notifications on my phone. I tend to keep my phone on silent most of the time. I still get banner notifications for a few things, but most of my notifications only go to my Notifications Center, they don’t pop up and interrupt what I’m doing. What that results in is a phone filled with red notification dots, every time I look at it. I know this would drive some people crazy, but I don’t mind.

I use the dots to remind myself that I’m in control. I don’t need to see what’s on social media, it will still be there when I choose to look. I will see all my email, but I won’t let email determine my schedule. I won’t let email interrupt what I’m doing now. I let my staff know that I will frequently look at Microsoft Teams, and that this is a faster way to connect with me than email.

This shift to MS Teams allows me to prioritize my staff over the last 10 emails that came in after a staff member asked me something on email. It allows me to contextual the conversation rather than letting outsiders determine what distracts me, simply because they were the most recent item in my email inbox. This shift has reduced my total daily emails, and it has also reduced my time on email further because I’m not getting emails I wish I saw hours before from my staff, and my staff know what to, and not to, add to my email.

I’m the first to admit that I probably still spend too much time on my phone, especially at home. It’s where I read my news, listen to audiobooks and podcasts, consume social media, and even create these daily blog posts. But I also know that reducing notification interruptions has helped me stay more focussed on the tasks I’m trying to complete both at work and at home.

The Netflix Trap

Despite the fact that I grew up in the era of Seinfeld and Friends being sitcoms that were on the air, I haven’t seen all of the episodes. My daughters have seen every episode in order, and my youngest daughter is on her 3rd round of watching Friends through all 10 seasons, or 236 episodes, on Netflix.

When I watched these shows, they were on TV, with commercials, and we didn’t have a VCR set up if we missed the time slot. By the time the reruns were on, I was already not a fan of waiting through commercials to watch a show.

This weekend I got sucked into a drama on Netflix, and still nursing an injured knee, I found myself in front of the television for hours. I fell deep into the Netflix trap watching the next episode, after the next episode, after the next episode. ‘OK, just 1 more,’ I’d tell myself, then just one more after that…

I do this sometimes on longer breaks like summer and Christmas break but it’s very rare that I sink into a series like this on a regular weekend. The appeal is strong when there are no commercials and the opening/closing credits can easily be skipped. There is no waiting until next week’s time slot on TV, no waiting for commercials either. Just show after show, with each ending designed to hook you into the next one.

Watching television has changed significantly. I can see how easy it is to stay trapped in front of it now in a way that wasn’t possible when I was younger. YouTube and Facebook can be the same for some, with the next video automatically playing after the one you are watching is done. Blink and several hours have gone by.

I had a good dose of this on the weekend, and I’m done for now… At least until the March break. The series I was watching has one more season and I’ll probably watch most of it in a two to three day span. I force myself to wait for an extended break. But when I start, I don’t pretend that I’m not easily sucked into the trap of binge watching, like many others.

Time and Attention

We are only ever fully present when we commit both time and attention to the things we value.

However:

  • We struggle with making time for things.
  • We struggle with giving things our full attention.

On a personal note: I don’t get too excited by anticipation. For some people, the excitement of planning something is almost as enjoyable as doing the actual thing. That’s not me. I don’t know how to put a value on this? Sometimes I think I’m missing out, other times I think I enjoy experiences more because I haven’t built it up in my head. But leaving anticipation aside, I know that at times I struggle to be fully present.

Sometimes the moment I arrive somewhere, I’m checking the time to know how long I have… I’m putting the present into a time slot. It seems there’s always another event in my calendar to get to. That’s not committing full attention.

Then on the opposite end is when I have a ton of time. Often when this happens I end up squandering much of that ’empty’ time… time that I wish I had when I’m busy; when my ‘To Do’ list is huge.

My writing changes when I give it both time and attention. This is why I’ve started writing at night. At first I needed my writing to fit into a tight timeline. I’d wake up and know that I had a maximum of 45 minutes to write, then get my meditation and workout in before my workday started. But some days I’d draw a blank and need to dip into my almost-ready drafts to fit everything in.

Now I get most of my writing done in the evening and without that hard timeline, I still usually spend less than 45 minutes writing. I think the freedom of no time constraint allows me to devote my full attention to writing.

I am not sure I’m always able to do this in other areas in my life? It isn’t easy to fully commit both time and attention to whatever we do in the present moment, but when we can do that, it is a rewarding experience. Carpe diem.

Hitting the goal posts

Wayne Gretzky had an amazing talent for scoring goals.  Three records that he holds, that may never be surpassed, are scoring in 51 consecutive games, scoring 50 goals in 39 games, and scoring 92 goals in one season (80 games). To accomplish this he did something very well… He would visually focus on the back of the net, the open space between the goal posts and the goalie, and he would send the hockey puck into those spaces. Yes, that’s what most hockey players want to do, but it’s not what they actually do.

When most people are aiming at a goal, be it in hockey, water polo, soccer, lacrosse, or any other sport with a net and a goalie, they are (almost) always aiming for the edges of the net, near the goal posts or crossbar. However it is challenging to aim at an empty space, so many people end up looking at the posts instead, and that’s what they end up hitting.

When I coached and saw someone hitting the crossbar a few times, sometimes I’d pull them aside and ask them to close their eyes. “Imagine the goalie and the bars of the goal behind her. Do you see them? Ok, now make them all one dark colour, like black. Now brighten the space between the goalie and and the bars. Got that in you head? Ok, aim there.”

Related to this, have you ever noticed the weird odds that a car accident will often include the collision with a telephone pole or a post, when there isn’t any other obstacle for quite some distance? The less interesting reason for this is that accidents that do not involve poles and posts are faster to clean up. The more interesting reason is that when a driver is in a dangerous situation and sees the post, they fixate on it, and while consciously scared and wanting to avoid it, their hands steer where their eyes go.

In school, there are many ways that a student can aim for the goal posts:

What do I need to do to get a ‘A’?

What’s the fastest way to get this done?

What does the teacher want me to do?

There are also many ways that educators can aim for the goal posts:

Teaching facts void of big ideas.

Teaching ‘the how’ without ‘the why’, (such as in Math, teaching that a negative times a negative equals a positive, and not explaining why this works). 

Counting marks rather than marking what really counts. 

None of these questions or examples are about learning. They aren’t on target; they aren’t the goal. But when we aim for the posts, we tend to miss the intended target, or in these examples, the intended outcomes.

What’s a goal post you are aiming at? And what would you be doing differently right now, if you were aiming at the net rather than the posts?