Meet Erica B. Marcus, Author of Attention Hijacked: Using Mindfulness to Reclaim Your Brain from Tech

In Attention Hijacked: Using Mindfulness to Reclaim Your Brain from Tech (Lerner 2022) author and mindfulness educator Erica B. Marcus invites young people and adults to mindfully assess how they utilize technology in their lives, reflect on its emotional and physical impacts, and to create personal and community goals for healthier technology use. We recently had the opportunity to speak to Erica about her work and the process of researching and writing this book, and we're excited to share it with you here!

Erica, thank you so much for speaking with us about Attention Hijacked! We are so excited to feature this book along with an Educator Guide on School Library Connection and to hear more about your work.

With 15 years of experience as a classroom teacher, mindfulness educator, and wilderness youth leader, you must have a deep well of stories about how your mindfulness work has developed. Could you share with us some of the threshold experiences that formed your thinking around this topic and paved the way for Attention Hijacked?

Erica B. Marcus: I think the experiences that brought this work to mind for me were twofold: personal and professional. For quite some time, I was a mindless social media consumer, hopping on Facebook, and later Instagram, to fill space in my life. Eventually, my mindfulness practice began to help me see more clearly the impact of this mindless consumption: the amount of time I was giving over to it with no purpose, the feeling of unsettledness that arose from scrolling, the loss of reading as a beloved practice in my life, the harm caused by my mind's natural tendency to compare, and more.

Simultaneously, I was teaching mindfulness to young people. We were exploring themes like our discomfort with boredom and awkwardness, our tendency to shy away from difficult emotions, and our need for distraction. These are all part of the human condition, but technology seems to quickly mollify these difficulties. Conversely, mindfulness asks us to stay with them and be curious about them. I started to ask young people how their technology was impacting their lives, and how that mapped onto some of these explorations.

In these conversations with young people, I heard from a lot of exasperated students that adults were saying one thing and doing another. We as adults can't wag our finger with one hand while texting away with the other.

I wanted this book to be a place to start conversations. Hopefully less defensive, more authentic, honest conversations, for adults and young people alike.

Yes, the anecdotes you include from young people throughout the book make the content so accessible, while also feeling very applicable to adults.

Throughout the book, you use the analogy of food to invite your readers to consider the effects of their technology intake on their bodies, encouraging them to be mindful of how it makes them feel. Can you speak to your blending in this book of mindfulness practices with technology use and information consumption?

EBM: Just as our bodies are literally made out of the nutrients we consume in food, our minds create schema of the many distinct pieces of information and experience we metabolize throughout our lives. In this way, technology can be both a boon and a curse. How much enriching information are we taking in that helps our minds make meaning of the world, build connections, and add complexity to our thinking? How much deleterious information are we taking in that causes us to think in more shallow, divisive, and even violent, terms? I find access to both of these through my technology. But unless I am paying attention in this open-hearted, curious way, I just don't see it. I don't feel it. I can't make choices about it. Bringing awareness and intention to our use helps us make healthier choices.

For our librarians looking for a tool to empower and activate their students, what are some features in Attention Hijacked that provide hands-on interactive practices that students can apply to their everyday lives? Are there specific ways that you recommend educators use this book with students?

EBM: I have really enjoyed using the book as an anchor text to help students talk about their experiences and their lives. Any of the journal prompts throughout the book can be great, both as reflective pieces and discussion prompts.

Chapter 5: Creating a Mindful Tech Diet has lots of concrete activities for students to work through. I have found the technology use survey (both in the book and part of the educator resources Lerner provides) and the phone investigation have both provided excellent fodder for discussion. This chapter also invites young people to reflect on their values, and line up their tech use up with those values.

Using the QR codes (or reading these sections aloud if my voice isn't your cup of tea) to lead students through the "5 Mindfulness Practices to Use While on Technology" (pp. 109–113) can help them investigate, in real time, how they are impacted by their technology. I think if we can get students to start reflecting regularly before, during, and after a session on technology, it will be really illuminating for them.

These sound like such powerful exercises, and the interactive components that invite refection and self-awareness will offer many rich opportunities for collaborative group work, too.

This book reminds us that young people are not alone in the struggle for balance between attention and wellness and technology—it affects adults, too! What do you think are three best action steps teachers and parents can model to support young people in forming and maintaining healthy habits with their technology?

EBM: I think young people, really all people, crave honesty, authenticity, and openness in their interactions. In my experience, young people do not want to be lectured by adults on this. They don't want to read another article about the harmful effects. But they are open to discussion and exploration, when approached with genuine curiosity. They also do like to hear from one another, as it makes them feel less alone.

Three Action Steps:

1. Listen. Have discussions from a place of curiosity. Facilitate discussions between young people. Listen closely to them.
2. Speak Your Truth. Be honest and reflective about your experience. Own your struggles. Do all the activities alongside your students.
3. Center Values. Keep your values and ideals at the forefront, and measure your tech use against your values. What do you care deeply about as a family, school, or individual? How does your tech use align with those values? In what ways does it allow you to live those values, and in what ways does it get in the way?

Finally, will you share with us a bit about the process of collecting and synthesizing all the sources that make up the book–what were some of the books or media that most inspired and informed your writing? How did you frame your interviews with students and go about collecting their impressions?

EBM: One of the first books I read on this specific subject was David Levy's Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300227017/mindful-tech/). I really appreciated his invitation to get curious about the nuance of one's experience with technology. While it was written for an older audience, a lot of the principles are available to us all. I also was deeply impacted by Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=16). It resonated with my personal experience of losing my capacity for deep concentration and reading more complex text when I was at my peak of technology use.

I also did a lot of digging into headlines about the impact of technology and trying to place them in a larger context of the research: it was surprising to read the meta-analyses and literature reviews. They weren't as definitive in proving causal relationships between tech use and negative impacts as the headlines often suggest. That said, the research might just be lagging behind reality, as we get more and more information every day (especially around social media use and mental health).

As for the interviews with students, after having informal conversations with them about this for years in the context of a mindfulness elective at a local STEM high school, I formally invited some of my students into a focus group around different aspects of tech use. Some of the themes were: benefits of tech, struggles with tech, adults misunderstandings about teen tech use, big tech and the attention economy, tech education in school, and social norms around tech use. From there, I explored similar themes with students from a few local middle schools, and then talked with some young folks in their early twenties with a mindfulness practice about their awareness of their use and how it helps them make choices.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with our librarian community about your work and this book?

EBM: I don't imagine that young people will pick this book up on their own. And really, it's not meant to be read that way. I see it as a tool for communities to work through together. I hope all readers explore, question, and even measure the words on the page against their own lived experience and knowledge base. I hope they turn towards each other and say, "That's true for me. That's not true for me," and ask for support in building new habits. We need each other so much right now. And communities need to decide how they want to be together, including technology as a piece of that puzzle.

Thank you so much for speaking to us about this thoughtful and timely book, Erica!