Abstract

Challenging formal education's traditional monopoly over the mass‐scale acculturation of youth, the technological infrastructure of the new economy brings in its wake a new “attentional economy” in which any “connected” adult or child owns and controls a full economic share of her or his own attention. For youth who have never known the text‐bound world from which their elders have come, new technologies afford them far greater power and greatly expanded rights that enable them to decide for themselves what they can see, think, and do, as their teachers grapple with ways to attract, rather than compel, students' voluntary attention. This paper reviews various formulations of “attentional economy,” and it urges the study of popular forms of technologically enabled play. These technologies effectively mobilize, direct, and sustain the engaged attention of youth, whose learning in and through play far exceeds the kind of glazed‐eyed button‐mashing complained of by those who have made little effort to understand the educative prospects of computer gaming