LEVER TIME PREMIUM: Big Tech Is “Attention Fracking” Our Brains

On this week’s episode of Lever Time Premium, exclusively for The Lever’s supporting subscribers, David Sirota is joined by Princeton history professor D. Graham Burnett, who recently co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times about the detrimental effects of our ever-diminishing attention spans. This is due to what Graham and his co-authors have dubbed “attention fracking” —  Big Tech’s profit-driven strategy to keep your eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible. 

David and Graham discuss how dwindling attention has affected students and educators, and how it directly contributes to our increasingly polarized politics.

Links:

• Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back. (The New York Times, 2023)

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