Between Turkle's fear that social media are distracting us into alienation and Cathy Davidson's argument that such negative characterizations of today's attentional practices are based on an outmoded view of what kind of attention is relevant and important, I asked, in Net Smart, whether the issue is that our attention int he context of social media . is mostly untrainedIf we agree that attention training would be a good idea, and we start with mindfulness and metacognition -- beginning to develop an internal awareness of how one's attention is attracted, distracted, manipulated via social media, and using that internal awareness to exert conscious control, what other elements ought to be included in attention/media training?

Suggest incorporating some consideration of the approaches that diff 'types' of people tend towards to support their adoption of new behaviours. Seems to me, from a non-HR/psych background but from some work in adult educn, that folks might select journalling, peer/mentor conversations, awareness of feedback from family/friends, analytics, online prompts (or some combo) - dependent on preference.

A key in this chaotic/complex space en.wikipedia.org may well be to act/probe and collectively sense-make, in fora such as this.

Enjoy yr weekends, Ed

I suppose "attentional styles" is what one might call the approach you suggest, Ed.

I'm not sure how this translates into attention training. Maybe it has to do with recognizing the conceptual framework underlying the particular attentional filter you are putting on the world -- the difference between folders and tags, and when to look at the world as a hierarchy or a network. I'm stretching here. I know that when I'm trying to retrain my way of looking at a knowledge-plex -- like using concept mapping instead of an outline -- I find that it takes practice to disengage one filter (take off the present lens) and start up another (look through another lens)

Hi Howard, I actually don't think screens change our attention. Because they are a new way of commanding our attention, they make us aware of our habits of attention that are unusually invisible to ourselves. If you are a Wall Street hedge fund trader, even before you had an iPhone, you paid attention to the stock market and ignored the guy on the corner with his hand out. That's an extreme example but my point is that we create institutions and values that obscure our awareness of our own habits, make us think of what we do as "natural" or "human" and either culture shock or the extreme dislocation of new technology suddenly makes us pay attention to habits we had taken for granted previously.

My attentional exercises are all to make people aware of how they pay attention. I've given 68 talks and I always begin with the interactive technology of notecards and pencils ask people to write the three things they think we most need to know in a digital age (or another question). Room goes silent as a tomb. Then I ask them to talk with a neighbor and circle the one most important thing on their two cards. Eruption of excitement. 90 seconds for each exercise. Then I point out I never said, in the first exercise, "answer in silence and alone" and, in Japan, in the 1980s, when I gave my first oral test, the students turned to one another, the han, for help. Culture, education, train us to silent, individual achievement.

We don't even know we have that pattern so deeply, habitually embedded. Actually, all research says we learn more in the second, interactive conversational situation---but we still think learning in formal education is about learning individually and alone (homework!) and testing that way, even though every corporation I talked to last year says it takes 2 years to retrain great students to be cognizant of what they don't know and think about ways of working together with someone who does to achieve a successful outcome. I'm always tricking my audience and my students into seeing patterns. Toffler: you have to unlearn a habit before you can learn. Katsu, the thunderclap that turns a life around.

Bottom line: I have a very ancient model of how to retrain attention for a digital age!

And note that I didn't even see the TIPS to my right: be casual, ask questions, try pasting links. I managed the first, not the second, because your question inspired me and I was on a roll and I didn't see anything else. Once you become of how what you see means there is something you don't see (attention blindness), then you start to see what you miss---but that's practice. In all circumstances, not just digital. The first date at the restaurant with the cell phone is just visually expressing a boredom that, a decade ago, pre-cell phone, might have been expressed by a wandering mind, dull conversation, nonstop meaningless chatter, or ending the evening as early as possible!

So . . . . I use a lot of classic zen attention exercises in "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" such as the raisin, eyes closed, five minutes thinking of one's thinking or the famous Howard Rheingold experiment: Close your laptops. Close down your cell phones. Now close your eyes.

I think that any attentional training program should include two things:

1. Stress reduction techniques

* Breathing exercises (pranayama) to calm sympathetic nervous system activity. If your sympathetic system is activated, you'll have a hard time actually maintaining executive control over attention.

* Mindfulness meditation - to encourage equanimity and detachment from one's environment.

2. Attention training techniques

* The work of neuroscientists like Richard Davidson has shown us that it's possible to thicken the prefrontal cortex and increase executive control through consistent meditation.

Mindfulness/vipassana has been the main meditation type studied, but there are specific meditation practices (Dhyana) for attention/focus

The third thing I think we need to learn and cultivate:

Environmental design.

We need to learn how to design our own environments to make them less overwhelming. Currently, we are in extremely cluttered media environments. We constantly need to determine (mostly subconsciously) whether or not each piece of media we encounter is good + relevant, or uninteresting/garbage. All of these micro decisions cause decision fatigue/ego depletion, which makes it harder to consciously control our attention and make reasoned choices.

The media environment itself will not change - it's being driven to more stimulating extremes. Instead, we need to learn how to shut off our phones, block time-sucking websites, and create highly filtered RSS feeds. We need to design our environments for optimal signal/noise.

Some people who are trying to change at least part of the media environment are the Calming Technology Lab at Stanford: calmingtechnology.org