From Mary Harrington’s substack:
Everyone knows the little glowing screen is an attention sink. Look around you on any busy street: most people stumble along, device in hand, eyes rapt.
But at the Pusey House conference where I delivered my recent talk on re-enchantment, the Revd Dr Matthew Burford made an argument that crystallised the implications of this. Rev Burford, a college professor and pastor, argued that attention is everything - for, he argued (I’m paraphrasing lightly) that what we attend to, we grow to love. What we love, we wish to protect. What we wish to protect, we create institutions to defend.
You can probably see already why this is germane to modern-day doomscrolling habits. If Rev Burford is right, how we allow our attention to be shaped, including by our technologies, is of profound moral significance.
More plainly: how and where we choose to direct attention becomes, organically, a form of prayer, that will in time organise everything we do. Thus, to the extent that scrolling colonises attention, scrolling is a form of prayer.
Or perhaps, a type of daily office, with morning, noon, evening prayer, compline, and many more “arrow prayers” between.
Unfortunately, I’m more addicted to scrolling than I am to prayer. Scrolling tempts one because of the repeated dopamine hit, which is absent in prayer—by design, I assume. Apparently God wants us to be motivated by something else.
Grace and peace,
Mark
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