I never heard of Chris Hayes, an MSNBC and podcast host, before reading The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource”. He gives an excellent overview of the impact that social media tech companies have on our ability to focus and pay attention to any one topic or each other. Engineers at these companies have turned mobile phones into slot machines, with a swipe of a thumb, which keeps feeding our brains infinite bits of information and entertainment. His premise is that our attention has been commodified, with businesses finding ways to get their share of our attention. Hayes asks the question in chapter 1, “Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books (harmless) or cigarettes (harmful)?”
One of my takeaways is the idea that getting people’s attention is the foundation of most modern human endeavors. Examples range from promoting oneself on LinkedIn to find a job to finding a girlfriend. Since the advent of the internet, “information is infinite and attention is limited”. No wonder students and many adults are so distracted and struggle to focus their minds on a single topic or task.
Personally, I find that I need to make a conscious effort to clear my mind of distractions and focus on what I want to accomplish during the day. Before mobile phones and the internet, I never had to do this. I do this through yoga and meditation every morning, and by ignoring my mobile phone with its podcasts, Google Chat messages, YouTube reels, etc. If this is a distraction for a middle-aged man, imagine what it must be for adolescents and young adults who grew up in this era. I am glad that our school and now most others are banning mobile phones, but we also need to teach specific techniques on how to avoid distractions and train our minds to block out the noise and focus on what is essential.
- “cocktail party effect” – The human brain suppresses a lot of background noise, when your name comes up in a conversation.
- “Boredom’s alter ego is Distraction”
- Tik Tok scrolling is the source of “Infinite Jest”
- “…as a society gets richer, it creates the conditions for far greater amounts of solitude, and with solitude comes the modern phenonmenon of loneliness”
- “for most of history, living alone was a fate usually reserved for outcasts, penitents, or holy men.” 1/4 of US households contain just a single person. The numbers are much higher in Europe. …a relationship between the rise of solitude in modern life and this process of ever more specific individuation of our attention.”
- “Alexander the Great deserves to be called the first famous person.”
- This is the Age of Attention and we need to grapple with the experience of alienation. Human attention has always existed but “clicks” “content” “engagement” and “eyeballs” are creations of attention capitalism. When attention capitalists want to increase the supply, they have no means of creating it:; they must instead find new ways to take it from us.”
- One way of defining culture is simply what everyone pays attention to, and what they pay attention to together.
- So much of modern self-help is geared towards closing the gap between what we say we want and value and how we act.
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