In a technologically advanced world, materialistic currency has become limited. Money and natural resources have been losing value to an infinite form of currency: our attention. As attention gains value as social media and screen time usage increase, more people begin to feed into the “attention economy.” As a part of a Speaker Series on Apr. 16 and 17, SPA hosted Amalia Mayorga from the Strother School of Radical Attention, based in Brooklyn, New York, to teach the community about “attention activism” and creating an increasingly focused environment as an individual. The session was held in Bigelow with 60 attendees on the Tuesday night session and 25 on Wednesday morning.

The Speaker Series began with Mayorga detailing Strother’s methods of attention activism and an attention economy. “I see it as an economic system that relies on extracting our attention to turn it into a commodity so that way, advertisers can make money off of selling us things,” she said. “That’s how big technology [companies] make money.”

Strother’s teachings of attention activism focus on hands-on learning through “attention labs.” The first attention lab consisted of participants pairing up, assigning one person to be the first speaker while the other became the listener. The listener was prohibited from introducing new ideas and could only reflect back what the speaker mentioned. The goal of the lab was for participants to fully focus on the speaker despite a mundane conversation prompt.

The goal of the second attention lab was to focus attention on the body. This lab began with participants closing their eyes and feeling their own hands thoroughly, and then transitioning to feeling their partner’s hands.

After each lab, Mayorga invited participants to share their experience with the rest of the group, garnering mixed reactions from the majority parent attendees. For the few students that attended, Mayorga offered strategies to stay focused and limit contributions to the large corporations of the attention economy. “My biggest takeaway was that being attentive to something shouldn’t be a chore,” sophomore Atari Ernst said. “I think that actually, if you pay attention to something, it can be really interesting.”

To wrap up the April Speaker Series session, Mayorga finished the session by providing ideas and resources on how to reduce attention on technology throughout the day and recommended Strother’s new summer attention labs. “I’m not the most attentive person because I get easily distracted but I’m hoping maybe in classes I can notice when my attention is shifting,” sophomore Paloma Gomez Whitney said.

The Strother School of Radical Attention is hosting two summer sessions for rising seniors in New York City: session one will be from Jun. 24-28, and the second session will be from Aug. 19-23. More information is available on schoolofattention.org.