Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back.
强大的力量正在压制我们的注意力。我们可以反击

The lament is as old as education itself: The students aren’t paying attention. But today, the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions. High school and college teachers overwhelmingly report that students’ capacity for sustained, or deep attention has sharply decreased, significantly impeding the forms of study — reading, looking at art, round-table discussions — once deemed central to the liberal arts.
这种感叹与教育本身一样古老：学生注意力不集中。但如今，注意力不集中或分散的问题已经达到了真正灾难性的程度。绝大多数高中和大学教师都报告说，学生持续或深度关注的能力急剧下降，严重阻碍了曾经被视为文科核心的学习形式--阅读、欣赏艺术、圆桌讨论。

By some measures you are lucky these days to get 47 seconds of focused attention on a discrete task. “Middlemarch” is tough sledding on that timeline. So are most forms of human interaction out of which meaningful life, collective action and political engagement are made.
从某些角度看，如今你能在一项独立任务上集中 47 秒钟的注意力就已经很幸运了。"在这个时间轴上，《中场战事》的难度可想而知。人类互动的大多数形式也是如此，而有意义的生活、集体行动和政治参与正是由这些互动形式构成的。

We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.
我们正目睹着新技术生活的黑暗面，其榨取利润的模式相当于对人类进行系统性的压裂：将大量高压媒体内容灌输到我们的脸上，以强行唤起被称为注意力的虚无而亲密的东西，这种东西现在在公开市场上交易。越来越强大的系统试图确保我们的注意力永远不属于我们自己。

In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution enabled harrowing new forms of exploitation and human misery. Yet through new forms of activity such as trade unions and labor organizing, working people pushed back against the “satanic mills” that compromised their humanity and pressed money out of their blood and bones. The moment has come for a new and parallel revolution against the dishonest expropriation of value from you and me and, most visibly of all, our children. We need a new kind of resistance, equal to the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.
19 世纪，工业革命带来了新形式的剥削和人类苦难。然而，通过工会和劳工组织等新形式的活动，劳动人民反击了 "撒旦工厂"，因为这些工厂损害了他们的人性，从他们的骨血中榨取金钱。现在是进行一场新的、并行的革命的时候了，这场革命的目标是从你我身上，最明显的是从我们的孩子身上不诚实地掠夺价值。我们需要一种新的抵抗，与生活在我们口袋里的撒旦小工厂相抗衡。

This is going to require attention to attention, and dedicated spaces to learn (or relearn) the powers of this precious faculty. Spaces where we can give our focus to objects and language and other people, and thereby fashion ourselves in relation to a common world. If you think that this sounds like school, you’re right: This revolution starts in our classrooms.
这就需要对注意力的关注，需要有专门的空间来学习（或重新学习）这一珍贵能力的力量。在这样的空间里，我们可以将注意力集中在物体、语言和他人身上，从而使自己与共同的世界融为一体。如果你觉得这听起来像学校，那就对了：这场革命始于我们的课堂。

We must flip the script on teachers’ perennial complaint. Instead of fretting that students’ flagging attention doesn’t serve education, we must make attention itself the thing being taught.
我们必须改变教师长期以来的抱怨。与其担心学生注意力不集中不利于教育，不如让注意力本身成为教学内容。

The implications of such a shift are vast. For two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy. But as once-familiar calls for an informed citizenry give way to fears of informational saturation and perpetual distraction, literacy becomes less urgent than attensity, the capacity for attention. What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.
这种转变的影响是巨大的。两个世纪以来，自由民主的拥护者们一致认为，个人和集体的自由需要素养。但是，随着人们对知情公民的呼声逐渐让位于对信息饱和和长期分心的担忧，读写能力的紧迫性已不如注意力，即关注能力。民主现在最需要的是一个专心致志的公民群体--能够一起从屏幕前抬起头来的人类。

Around the world, informal coalitions of educators, activists and artists are conducting grass-roots experiments to try to make that possible — from the writer Jenny Odell to the philosopher James Williams, from the Center for Humane Technology, a large project to investigate the ethics of tech, to the intimate art events of the Slow Reading Club. Call it attention activism.
从作家珍妮-奥德尔（Jenny Odell）到哲学家詹姆斯-威廉姆斯（James Williams），从研究科技伦理的大型项目 "人道技术中心"（Center for Humane Technology）到 "慢阅读俱乐部"（Slow Reading Club）的私密艺术活动，世界各地的教育工作者、活动家和艺术家们正在开展非正式的基层实验，试图让这一切成为可能。这就是注意力行动主义。

We three are members of one such community, the Strother School of Radical Attention. Working in classrooms — as well as museums, public libraries, universities — we have heard from thousands of people across the country and beyond about their struggles to give themselves to the world, and to others, in the ways they want. They are describing the damage that attention-fracking does, violence that the philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice.”
我们三人就是这样一个团体--斯特罗瑟激进关注学校--的成员。我们在教室、博物馆、公共图书馆和大学工作，听到全国各地和其他地方数以千计的人讲述他们为以自己想要的方式将自己奉献给世界和他人而进行的斗争。他们描述了注意力裂变所造成的伤害，哲学家米兰达-弗里克（Miranda Fricker）称之为 "认识论上的不公正"。

The curriculum we have developed takes on a challenge that so many of us face: how to create, beyond the confines of our personalized digital universes, something resembling a shared world.
我们开发的课程应对了我们许多人都面临的挑战：如何在个人化数字世界的局限之外，创建一个类似于共享世界的东西。

It starts with experience, both individual and collective, with a focus on students’ self-conscious and self-aware experiences of reading, observing, reflecting and problem-solving. Consider a simple exercise known as “Attention in Place,” inspired by the work of the experimental writer Georges Perec. For his short work, “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris,” Mr. Perec sat at a corner cafe in his beloved city and over the course of three days recorded everything he saw, with particular attention to the supposedly mundane (what he called “infra-ordinary”) events that might under normal circumstances have gone unnoted.
它从个人和集体的经验入手，注重学生在阅读、观察、反思和解决问题过程中的自我意识和自觉体验。考虑一下一个简单的练习，即 "在原地注意"，其灵感来自实验作家乔治-佩雷克的作品。佩雷克先生在他的短篇作品《穷尽巴黎一个地方的尝试》中，坐在他心爱的城市的一个角落咖啡馆里，用三天时间记录了他所看到的一切，特别关注那些在正常情况下可能被忽略的所谓的平凡事件（他称之为 "次平凡"）。

In our much shorter exercise, after reading an excerpt from Mr. Perec’s work, participants head out into the neighborhood and spend 30 minutes jotting down their observations of absolutely whatever unfolds in the world around them. Upon returning to the group, we sit in a circle and read one line each, consecutively, from these newfound observations.
在我们时间更短的练习中，参与者在阅读完佩雷克先生的作品节选后，到附近用 30 分钟时间记下他们对周围世界发生的任何事情的观察。回到小组后，我们围成一圈，每人读一行新发现的观察结果。

Sounds so simple! But the results are very close to miraculous: A common ground is rediscovered in the weave of collective attention. What I saw, you heard; the breeze that you felt passed my corner as well. A joint song of place unfolds, and with it a giddy, collective sense that the world is ours. The first-person plural becomes real, and the dynamics of attention are revealed as the choreography of our individual beings in shared time and space.
听起来很简单！但结果却近乎奇迹：在集体关注的交织中，我们重新找到了共同点。我所看到的，你都听到了；你所感受到的微风，也从我的身边掠过。一首共同的地方之歌展开了，随之而来的是一种眩晕的集体感觉：世界是我们的。第一人称复数变成了现实，注意力的动态被揭示为我们个体在共享时空中的编排。

Deep questions ensue: How do language and identity structure what we are capable of seeing and knowing? How do we change the world when we perceive it differently — and work to articulate those perceptions? What are the political implications of a world we do (and do not) share in fundamental ways? In no time it becomes clear that attention — giving it and getting it — constitutes social life.
深奥的问题接踵而至：语言和身份如何决定我们能够看到和了解什么？当我们以不同的方式感知世界并努力表达这些感知时，我们如何改变世界？我们从根本上共享（或不共享）的世界会产生哪些政治影响？很显然，关注--给予关注和获得关注--构成了社会生活。

Subjects like these are usually consigned to rarefied university seminars. But we have seen these discussions arise in city parks, in E.S.L. classrooms, in public libraries and in after-school mental health programs, as participants speak from the authority of their own experience, guided by a commitment to themselves as a sensitive attentional instrument.
像这样的主题通常都是在大学里的稀有研讨会上讨论的。但我们看到，在城市公园、E.S.L.课堂、公共图书馆和课后心理健康项目中都出现过这样的讨论，参与者以自己的经验为权威，以对自己的承诺为指导，将自己作为一种敏感的注意力工具。

This new paradigm of attention education demands that we dig in on the magic of this instrument. And that we build coalitions of everyone who uses it. That means teachers and students, but also welders, surfers — anyone who does anything with care and immersive commitment, anyone who treasures true attention.
这种新的注意力教育模式要求我们挖掘这种工具的魔力。而且，我们要建立由使用它的每个人组成的联盟。这意味着教师和学生，但也包括焊工、冲浪者--任何用心和全身心投入做任何事情的人，任何珍惜真正注意力的人。

Small groups of humans turning off their phones and paying attention for half an hour in their local park is obviously not, in itself, the revolution that will bring the attention frackers to their knees. But it offers a model we can build on, of people coming together to decide (and dispute!) how the world is, and how we think it ought to be. That is the practice of freedom — the essence of democracy — and the high purpose of education itself.
一小群人在当地的公园里关掉手机，专心致志地玩上半个小时，这本身显然不是一场能让那些 "注意力裂解者 "屈服的革命。但它为我们提供了一个可以借鉴的模式，即人们聚集在一起决定（和争论！）世界是怎样的，以及我们认为它应该是怎样的。这就是自由的实践--民主的精髓--也是教育本身的崇高目标。

Our attention is born free, but is, increasingly, everywhere in chains. Can our systems of liberal education rise to this challenge? The Harvard political philosopher Danielle Allen recently wrote: “I have a hunch that if we are to put this problem of attention at the center of what we are asking the humanities to do right now, we might find a huge appetite for the work of the humanities. We might change the dynamics we see on college campuses and in other contexts, where the practice of the humanities seems to be slipping away.”
我们的注意力生来自由，但却越来越多地受到束缚。我们的通识教育体系能够应对这一挑战吗？哈佛大学政治哲学家丹妮尔-艾伦（Danielle Allen）最近写道："我有一种预感，如果我们把注意力问题放在我们现在要求人文学科做的事情的中心，我们可能会发现人文学科的工作有巨大的吸引力。我们可能会改变我们在大学校园和其他环境中所看到的动态，在这些环境中，人文学科的实践似乎正在逐渐消失。

All those who have given their attention to as supposedly arcane a topic as ancient Greek will know that the word “crisis” derives from a word that can mean “to decide.” And that is precisely what’s before us: a decision about what ends, exactly, the liberal arts will serve in the 21st century. No form of education can solve all our problems at a stroke. But attention education can produce a new generation of citizens who are equipped to take on those problems conscientiously and with care.
所有关注过古希腊这样一个所谓神秘话题的人都会知道，"危机 "一词来源于一个可以表示 "决定 "的词。而这正是摆在我们面前的问题：决定文科在 21 世纪究竟要达到什么目的。任何形式的教育都无法一蹴而就地解决我们的所有问题。但是，关注教育可以培养出新一代的公民，他们有能力认真和谨慎地应对这些问题。

D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of history and history of science at Princeton, and the co-editor of “Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses.” He is the founder and director of the nonprofit Institute for Sustained Attention. Alyssa Loh, a filmmaker, is a Sundance Institute & Alfred P. Sloan Development fellow who co-directed the short film “Twelve Theses on Attention.” Peter Schmidt is the program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn.
D. 格雷厄姆-伯内特（D. Graham Burnett）是普林斯顿大学历史与科学史亨利-查尔斯-莱亚（Henry Charles Lea）教授，也是《注意力的场景》（Scenes of Attention）一书的共同编辑：关于心灵、时间和感官的论文 "的合著者。他是非营利机构 "持续注意力研究所"（Institute for Sustained Attention）的创始人和主任。电影制片人 Alyssa Loh 是圣丹斯学院和阿尔弗雷德-P-斯隆发展研究员，与他人合作导演了短片《关于注意力的十二篇论文》。彼得-施密特（Peter Schmidt）是布鲁克林斯特罗特激进注意力学校（Strother School of Radical Attention）的项目主任。

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