Terms like “human fracking” and “attention activism” filled the room at the Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts on Friday, Nov. 7, during Dr. Graham Burnett’s keynote speech on the subject of AI. Entitled “Will Higher Ed Survive AI?,” Burnett’s speech covered a range of subjects on the use of AI at higher education institutions like Vassar College and Princeton University, where he teaches. For the audience’s understanding, Burnett used two sections of his keynote speech to define these terms and, in doing so, introduced a distinctly unique and insightful approach to the emergence of AI and its relationship to our attention spans.
Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, where he leads a class on the history of human attention. He began his talk by establishing himself as an activist and advocate for the reclamation of human attention. Burnett explained that he works with a group called “Friends of Attention,” who are dedicated to a movement to protect our intentional practices. These “intentional practices” are the human things we do that require our care and attention. Practices like reading, or interacting with others. He explained that he is a part of this movement and this group. “It is a movement of people who care about you, protecting and nourishing human attention.” This movement is imperative, he explained, to educational spaces. To keep these spaces full of our human thought and contribution, we have to work to protect them. He explains: “Education and storytelling need to be rethought as practices of attention.”
According to Burnett, our attention is threatened by a process called “human fracking.” He explained that human fracking is the process by which our attention is commodified for money through social media and technology. We lose hours on end to social media as a result of an algorithmic manipulation of our interests and personalities. Human fracking exploits our minds and takes away from our time dedicated to our actual interests.
Following his explanation of this “human fracking,” Burnett asked the audience, “Do you ever feel concerned about your attention span?” There was a unanimous response of raised hands and nodding heads. Seemingly, everyone feels that their phone, or their technology more generally, is impacting their ability to pay attention. Burnett argues that this theft of attention is an exploitation of our minds for money: “Right now, new technologies have made possible new forms of exploitation, new ways to make money. A new generation of tech capitalists have figured out that it is possible to extract money value directly from human consciousness.”
This is the use of our attention for money and what Dr. Burnett defined as human fracking. “Human fracking is to the internal environment of our consciousness, what petroleum fracking is to the terrestrial environment,” he described. After defining this term, he emphasized the importance of calling this process out. Rather than leaving the audience with this dark and sobering concept, he explained that there are easy ways in which we can protect our minds from this exploitation. We have to identify the processes of human fracking in order to be able to protect our attention and our educational spaces.
He urged the audience to begin to designate collective spaces of shared interests and protect them from erasure, which is “attention activism” in his own terms. Burnett made the distinction that he does not believe technology, or even the use of AI, is destroying our actual intellect: “Intellectual life is not coming to an end, our relationship to text is not coming to an end.” Rather, he believes that we have to think about a new way to dedicate our attention to study and learning. Finding new ways to interact with study, literature and the humanities—the subjects many academics fear are coming to an end with AI—is imperative to keeping them intact. This is the kind of attention activism that is required to protect our learning.
Despite his arguments against the exploitation of human attention, Burnett is not against technology in and of itself., “I’m not anti-tech. I’m anti-exploitation.” He described his own incorporation of AI and technology into his courses as a professor and the ways in which technology provides us with a connection. Technology is a part of education now, and Burnett actively acknowledges this by asking students to use AI in certain assignments. Students use chatbots to engage in conversation about the course subject, and in doing so the course incorporates our evolving technology into a place of learning. The invention of these technologies on their own is not the problem—it is the loss of our intentional practices to be turned into money for a business.
The emergence of artificial intelligence has posed a lot of difficult questions to students and educators alike, particularly in the face of plagiarism and circumventing assignments using the tools of AI. Many educators, even at the same institutions, take widely different stances on the use of AI in their classrooms, some insisting that we must acknowledge its existence by incorporating it into their curriculum. Others are avidly against its use and believe that it is destroying the humanities by way of eliminating the process of thinking and reflection in writing.
Burnett’s speech provided an incredibly insightful perspective on how protecting our attention is a movement that must be collective. He closed by referencing an analogy that compares a movement to the process of “swailing,” where small brush fires are lit to restore the overall vegetation health and prevent future fires. The movement of attention activism turns towards lighting “smaller fires” to renew intentional practices of human attention and protect intellectual capacities from commodification. Burnett’s speech prompted the room to reflect on what it means to have attention in our changing, technological world.