Where has our attention gone? The theory that it is being depleted drastically in some fundamental way, closely related to the sinkholes of time we spend online, has gained traction ever since Nicholas Carr published The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, in 2010.
Little did we know what lay ahead in our current doomscrolling, meme-laden era. Back then, Facebook and Twitter had been launched to the public barely four years earlier and not long after, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone with its groundbreaking touchscreen that would enable the “infinite scroll” and an endlessly replenished social media timeline.
How innocent and fun it all seemed. Initially, Carr’s take was a controversial downer. But as more studies have been done, and evidence has accrued, his thesis – that we are losing the ability to concentrate deeply as we adapt to the ‘net’s information torrent packaged into superficial chunklets – now appears depressingly prescient.
Yet the how and why of this phenomenon remains elusive. In The Siren’s Call, US journalist and well-known MSNBC broadcaster Chris Hayes argues that to understand what is happening, we need to pay more attention to our attention. He wants the reader to understand “attention as a resource, a substance extracted for its market value, and that this resource has been growing in value and is now the most important resource”.
That may sound dry, but in Hayes’s hands, it is not. The book persuasively fills a gap in deeply and broadly exploring what attention is, dipping into numerous perspectives from the psychological and neurological, to the economic and sociological. His research is worn lightly and presented with verve and clarity, with just the right balance between lively conversation and intellectual challenge.
He is convincing on how we are hard-wired in evolutionary terms to be lured by the siren’s call of social media timelines and other internet features algorithmically designed to snare us. Hayes is especially good on why we should understand our attention as a valuable resource. It fuels the mega-platforms, it creates vast wealth for the tech giants and it feeds the ego, ambitions and alas, success of dangerously irresponsible public figures.
He offers plenty of meaty bits on just how manipulated we are, why we feel so alienated despite the net’s instant access to billions of people, and how the duplicitous online shoutiness of our particular moment keeps pulling people in. “A big lie,” he writes, “is often more attentionally compelling than a list of small truths.”
Hayes supplies a small Irish hat-tip to this paper and columnist Patsy McGarry. Hayes says the earliest reference to the term “whataboutism” seems to have originated in a 1974 letter to The Irish Times, which McGarry identified in a 2017 In A Word column.
Hayes certainly had my attention to the conclusion of The Siren’s Call, even if the final brief chapter of proposed countermeasures seems an inadequate counterweight to the bleak place the technology giants have brought us to harvest and exploit our attention – or allow others to do so.
Hayes is namechecked several times in Owned: How Tech Billionaires Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left by journalist Eoin Higgins. Hayes remains a prominent voice on the left, but early on he interviewed the then left-leaning journalist Glenn Greenwald who, along with another high-profile journalist Matt Taibbi, are the intense focus of Higgins’s detailed examination of how and why these men, once giants on the left, have lurched so astonishingly to the far right.
Greenwald was perhaps best known, and once lionised on the left for working to publish the files obtained by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden, while Taibbi established a strong reputation in probing pieces written for Rolling Stone. Both now have had various lucrative podcasts on far-right platforms, and appear on the shows of other significant hard-right media figures.
To show why, Higgins follows the far-right money coming from a roster of prominent ultraconservative tech billionaires including Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Elon Musk (who gave Taibbi exclusive publishing rights for the rather damp squib of the leaked Twitter Files, if you remember those).
Higgins is convincing and hard-hitting in his argument that personal financial benefit caused Greenwald and Taibbi to slink to the right, though Hayes could provide insight here too, as both also gained a vastly greater profile – from far more attention – on the right than they did on the left. The result, says Higgins, is two influential apologists for the actions and end goals of their paylord billionaires.
Given their focus, both books inevitably have a strong US focus. But that’s helpfully of the moment. We all need to understand how our attention is manipulated and monetised by these predominantly American companies, billionaires and politicians.
