Commonweal editor Dominic Preziosi joined a slew of other journalists, artists, and authors at the University of Notre Dame for the inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium on April 10. Preziosi moderated parts of the day’s discussion, which was hosted by the recently launched Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.
Participating in the event were Rainn Wilson, actor, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author; Vauhini Vara, journalist and author; Shankar Vedantam, author and host of the Hidden Brain podcast; and Jenny Odell, artist and author. During the panel, each speaker respond to the question, “How should we hold attention?”
The Franco Institute described this as “an urgent yet enduring question,” especially in an age where social media is dominated by short-form video content, and there are more demands on our attention than ever before.
Preziosi moderated Vedantam’s talk in which he spoke about the phenomenon of “nested interruptions” and the obstacles to overcoming distraction.
Humans’ instinctual urge to notice new movements and sounds, Vedantam explained, “has been a huge value to our ancestors, to our survival. [It] “now turns out to be something that’s hijacked by the attention economy because filmmakers and social media have discovered that if you change things quickly, people will pay attention to them.”
The question of how to reclaim attention—and what we lose when we don’t—was a topic of discussion at one of our Roots conversation series events, featuring author and ethicist Jennifer A. Herdt and poet and author Shane McRae. Commonweal features editor Alexander Stern moderated their conversation, which took place on February 12, at Columbia University’s Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary. More recently, Commonweal associate editor Regina Munch discussed how we can reclaim our attention with D. Graham Burnett, professor at Princeton University and author of Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, on The Commonweal Podcast. You can listen to the episode here.
