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Lately, as I feel my brain being pulled in a thousand directions — Kimmel’s off the air! He’s back on the air! Apparently we’re killing all the cows? Ooh, cute cats in costumes! — I’ve become a bit obsessed with books about attention.
The most recent I’ve been enjoying/appalled by is Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
In it, the Emmy-winning host of MSNBC’s All In breaks down the many ways our attention has been splintered but also mined, and the bizarre world we live in now, where attention is both a commodity and the end goal in and of itself.
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Hayes’ focus is particularly interesting to me, as someone who works in news media.
One of the complaints often launched at mainstream media is that we tend to cover the sensational, the lurid, the grisly — stories that used to be the bread and butter of penny dreadful tabloids — when all the intelligent reader/viewer/listener wants is cogent, sober analysis of the important issues of the day.
Hayes, as someone who works every day in a medium that measures exactly how many eyeballs are taking in his content, knows this isn’t true. However much viewers kvetch that the nightly news has let stories about, say, the war in Ukraine fall by the wayside, their viewing habits indicate they’re tuning out every time Kyiv hits the air; their dwindling interest is steering coverage, not the other way around.
He also points out that fractured attention is part of what allows fake news to flourish.
If the Free Press provided false or inaccurate information day after day, subscribers would A) take notice and B) turn elsewhere.
But when the only goal is to gather clicks and likes and follows from people scrolling past, it doesn’t matter what you post. A badly curated social media feed is like an algorithmic penny dreadful, filled with conspiracies, fabrications and outrage, but one that owes scrollers no followup and no corrections; in fact, a reader may never see that particular account again.
Hayes also delves into the way the constant clamouring for attention affects the arts, talking about the way artists now have to use social media to promote themselves as a brand: the “ever-changing posting strategies and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art.
“Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors — anyone whose works concerns itself with what it means to be human — now have to be entrepreneurs too.”
In part, The Sirens’ Call made me realize why I treasure time in theatres and cinemas so much. I’m as much a slave to social media as anyone, but I would never dream of pulling out my phone during a play or a movie, both because I’m not an animal, and because my full attention is on the stage or the screen.
As those opportunities become ever-scarcer, we should treasure them more.
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