Have you ever pulled out your phone just to look at the time and ended up scrolling through Instagram for ten minutes?

Have you ever looked around at a family gathering to see that all the adults in the room were looking down at their phones just scrolling?

Have you ever opened a Reddit window during a part of a Zoom meeting that didn’t pertain to you without even really thinking about what you were doing?

I’ll admit to all of these. And if I, a 40-year-old professional with an advanced degree, can fall victim to these distractions, what hope is there for our 18-year-old students who have grown up in this digital environment?

When I started my career in learning experience design, I considered myself a technology optimist–I believed that evolving technology was generally empowering for people. In the last few years, I’ve become less confident in that. Why? Because the techniques that tech companies use to gain and retain our attention have become so much more sophisticated. Billions of dollars have been poured into developing and refining techniques to keep us in social-media apps and GACHA games. The content you’re shown in social media is algorithmically chosen to maximize your time in the app, using everything they know about human psychology, everything they know about you and your habits, and everything they know about what others like you are looking at.

In the context of online learning, this is concerning. Tragically, the same devices that are portals to universes of data, ideas, and perspectives, the same devices that power our productivity and creativity, the same devices that are our means of connecting with students and conducting our classes–those same devices are also portals to black holes of a little bit of everything all of the time that our primate brains cannot easily resist.

Can I promise that your students don’t have another browser tab open scrolling through memes during your Zoom class session? Can I promise that they’re not playing a game on their phone while “watching” your recorded lecture on D2L? I cannot.

Even for in-person classes, where you might think you have a monopoly on students’ attention during the class meeting, the bulk of student work and preparation at the college level takes place outside the classroom (or should at least). 

In this context, if you have students who are having a hard time giving your class their full attention, I would urge you not to see it as a moral failing or an insult to you personally or to your discipline. Rather, they are victims of a billion-dollar conspiracy to trap their eyeballs. If you ask them, they might even tell you they’d rather be rid of these apps.

So let’s be allies with our students. We can certainly structure our course materials to be more engaging and interactive. But I would argue that to really meet the moment as educators, we should also be helping students cultivate the ability to manage their own attention, as with teaching other essential soft skills, in order to be successful in college and beyond. As part of our teaching practice, we can coach students on techniques to empower them to combat attention manipulation.