Author: Skylar Riedell

In present-day society, we have so much accessibility to things that take our attention away from real life. Having access to all of this technology and apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc., causes most people to be distracted from their lives and things that really matter. When things get stressful, most people’s first reaction is to distract themselves by using technology and social media. Social media has the power to completely take our minds off of real life, for hours at a time, without us even noticing it. This week, I have paid attention to and tracked what I give my attention to and how often my attention was interrupted, redirected, or captured by other things. I kept track in my journal files each day about what I intentionally chose to focus on and what demanded my attention. This exercise taught me a lot about myself and how much or what things take my attention away. It is easy to assume that distractions come from me being lazy or procrastinating, but it was important to remind myself throughout this process that a lot of the things that take my attention are designed to do just that.

My Attention this Past Week:

One category I made sure to focus on was when I would focus my attention on something intentionally. When I sat down to do schoolwork this past week, I was intentionally putting my attention towards it. I would say doing schoolwork is something I feel forced to attend to, rather than agreeing to attend to, which definitely has an effect on my attention span while doing it. My assignments I have had this week were pretty light, like one-page papers, or filling out graphic organizers. These assignments would typically take me about forty-five minutes if I had full attention consistently throughout doing them. I chose to do these assignments in my living room, while the television was on, my phone was beside me, and my roommates were there. While focusing my attention on my schoolwork, it had gotten drawn away many times to the television and to talking to my friends. An assignment that would usually take me forty-five minutes ended up taking me an hour and a half, just because of these distractions. It makes me curious if I would’ve made my time more useful if I focused only on my schoolwork and got it done quicker and then hung out in the living room after, or if doing my assignment the way I did it made my time more useful because I could hang out with friends and do schoolwork at the same time.

As I mentioned earlier in the introduction, social media is a huge attention grabber in society nowadays. I made sure to track my social media usage throughout this week, and it was definitely an eye-opening experience. I spend multiple hours of my day on social media, averaging about three hours a day, more specifically, on TikTok. TikTok is the main social media app that takes my attention, as it is designed in a way to keep your attention for long periods of time without you realizing it. It gives you exact videos that it knows you’ll enjoy, and shows you these videos one after another at a fast pace, which are qualities that cause me to spend hours at a time on the app. I find that it is much harder to take my attention away from TikTok, than it is from my schoolwork, which I assume is because schoolwork isn’t designed to take your attention, while TikTok is. It is also very clear after observing my social media usage that a lot of my life is being used for watching other people’s lives, instead of experiencing my own. This is something that most people experience at this current time, and it does make me feel uneasy about the direction we are going in as a society. I think a common thought that people have, including myself sometimes, is that we think that we’re still having experiences while watching social media, as there are good qualities like connecting with others, educational content, etc. And although these qualities of social media are good and can be beneficial, it is still very clear that social media, for the most part, takes away from our lives more than it adds to them. After observing my social media usage throughout this week, I will be paying more attention to how often I am using social media as a distraction, and I will be working towards using it a lot less.

What I Learned:

Life really is what we make it, and life consists of what we put our attention towards. The hardest part of redirecting where you put your attention in your everyday life isn’t identifying that there is a problem, but it is actually making changes that stay consistent. I firmly believe that social media is an addiction, and I know that a lot of my attention in my life goes to social media, instead of real-life experiences. This experience has taught me how much I want to make these changes, because I want to experience my life to the fullest. It is easier said than done, but I think society would improve tremendously if everyone made at least some improvements to what they put their attention towards and how we live our lives.

Before participating in transcribing documents on Douglass Day, I was unaware of what the Colored Conventions Project was. I not only got to experience something new for myself, but I was also so thankful to learn about such a good and cool thing. I learned that the Colored Conventions Project is a digital history and research project that focuses on recovering and sharing the history of nineteenth-century Black political organizing. Throughout history, Black voices have been silenced, and I loved experiencing being a part of something as amazing as what the Colored Conventions Project is doing. On Frederick Douglass’s birthday, participants celebrate by coming together to help preserve and transcribe Black historical documents in an event called the transcribe-a-thon. When I first arrived at the event, I didn’t really know what was going on until I heard my teacher say what to do. He said to sign up on a website called Zooniverse. I had some trouble logging into the website because so many people were transcribing and participating in Douglas Day. I overcame this issue by retrying signing up a couple of times, and eventually it worked. I then said something on the website that said “Douglass Day,” which I clicked on. It brought me to choose which state I wanted to transcribe documents from. Once I chose Pennsylvania, it brought me to the screen to transcribe. I then began typing in VS Code, which I would eventually copy and paste over to the website text box. I had never transcribed something before, and I actually really enjoyed it, which surprised me. When I began transcribing, I ran into a couple of problems with how to accurately transcribe. I was worried I would mess up the spacing, spelling errors, or certain extra text on the documents that weren’t clearly written in the main text. I overcame the issue by looking at the directions on the transcription page, which told me specifically how to go about these issues, which was really helpful. I transcribed one longer document and one shorter one before I ran out of time. The longer document seems to be from the proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Color. The shorter document is a fragment of political resolutions from a Colored Convention in 1884, where African Americans held meetings to organize politically after the Reconstruction. These documents were published to discuss ideas about education, civil rights, abolition, and Black self-organization among free Black communities in the 1800s. I used AI to help me identify where these documents came from because I couldn’t figure that out on my own. There were at least around thirty people in the room I was in, and a live stream with a chat where people could communicate and also come together from all around the world to recover Black history together. During the live stream, they not only discussed the event, but they also did certain things to celebrate the day. They did things like sing the happy birthday song to Frederick Douglass, reenact speeches, and had birthday cake. The room that I was in also had a birthday cake at the front of the room for people to eat if they chose. They were saying on the live stream that they were breaking records with the amount of participation in the event this year. Nearly 7,800 people participated in the event this year from all around the world. That is such a huge number of people coming together to make a difference. Engaging with archival documents during the transcribe-a-thonon Douglass day made me see history with a different perspective. It made history feel more immediate and human. Instead of looking at history using textbooks or stories told by outsiders, I was seeing history with primary sources and firsthand documents. It made me feel more connected to that history and to the people behind these documents. It was also interesting seeing the different uses of language that people had in different time periods through this experience. It wasn’t just the history that I found enlightening about this experience; it was also the collaboration that such a large group of people had during this event. I always find it so beautiful when so many people come together to do something, especially when it’s something so impactful like this. Making Black history more accessible and visible is so important, and participating in such an event was such an amazing experience. It is such a cool thing how many people came together for this event, and I loved being one of them.