ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges dominant discourses that frame digital distraction as either a mental deficit requiring ‘discipline’ or as a form of economic exploitation associated with the ‘attention economy’. Moving beyond metaphors of attention as a limited resource, it advances the theoretical framework of attention structures, which positions attention as a social practice emerging at the intersection of technologies, historical bodies, and social relationships. Through an examination of digital interfaces, algorithmic systems, and online interaction patterns, the chapter maps how different ‘attentional regimes’ (loyalty, alert, projection, and immersion) emerge through our entanglements with digital media, producing particular ways of attending. This theoretical intervention offers a more nuanced understanding of ‘distraction’ that avoids both technological determinism and the pathologisation of individual behaviour while acknowledging the genuine challenges posed by business models and interface designs based on the extraction and commodification of attention. The chapter concludes by reframing attentional literacies as fundamentally ethical and political, concerned with what we collectively value and how we care for one another through practices of attending. Rather than teaching students merely to ‘unplug’ or exercise ‘willpower’, the proposed pedagogical interventions invite learners to document, experiment with, and collaboratively re-engineer attention structures in their everyday lives.
