Education has always entailed tenacious ties with attention and being attentive to something in different senses. Today, as we are immersed in digital devises and they have become an inevitable part of our lives, speaking of attention becomes a more crucial issue. Several thinkers tried to address the issue of attention not only in educational sense but also philosophical and political one.

However, what I would like to discuss about in my paper is not directly discussing the current discourses in attention, but to pay “attention” to the other side of the coin, if we may see it as a coin, which is distraction. Notably because there are a lot of distractions today and as some people called it, we are living in the age of distraction.

I think it is essential to dwell about distraction in educational context and in relation to the new generation, who are born with digital devices as a given part of their environment. Benjamin’s concept can help us to look at distraction as a possibility for new ways of perceiving and understanding things.

On my way to study distraction, I was intrigued by the way Walter Benjamin addressed distraction in regard to the mass in his article about the work of art in the time of technological reproduction. He introduces a new kind of reception for art, which is reception in the state of distraction. I believe that his notion of distraction can be relevant in explaining our current situation and the way we can understand distraction in time of digital immersion.

In order to demonstrate that, I will try to elaborate what distraction, and reception in distraction means in Benjamin’s text. I will also discuss some of the main critiques on his notion and suggest my own point of view. 

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