The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes

   This was a good final book to read in my media section that begin focusing on print, moved to TV, and then finished on the internet and social media (with some art in there too). This book is heavily influenced by Amusing Ourselves to Death, and seeks to address the same issues in an updated form. Whereas Postman analyzed a lack of attention span and serious thought as an outgrowth of TV culture and the requirement to make difficult topics fit in thirty minutes or an hour on TV, Hayes updates the issue for the modern day with TikToks and algorithms.

     Some of the writers that Hayes cites to frame the problem of modern society as being a problem of democracy- the masses deciding to rule without having the capacity to do so. Hayes is more optimistic about people having the capacity to rule themselves, and frames the problem as social media having corrupted the internet, which could have been a healthy force for democracy. Instead, social media warped democracy and created polarization, conspiracy theories, disinformation, and distrust. But above all, the issue for Hayes is attention. Our phones have become black holes of attention and completely changed the internet. Unlike commodity markets, in which high demand for wheat can be met by growing more wheat, the attention market suffers from a hard limit on supply. There are only so many eyeballs, and that means the way to get attention must be to take it from somewhere else.

     Now, instead of paying attention to people in real life, we pay attention to people on our phones, making the people in real life sadder than the phone people are made happy. We are replacing social relationships with friends and family with parasocial relationships with celebrities and influencers who see us as numbers and aren’t even made happy by our attention to them. Hayes uses the work of philosopher Alexandre Kojève and his own experience as a celebrity on TV to analyze this, which is the best part of the book, since I’ve never seen an author analyze their own celebrity like this before. He points out that we crave attention as a means to get recognition. But we can only be satisfied by recognition we get from our peers or superiors. Recognition from people we view as inferior is rarely satisfying. Social media creates less happiness on net because it takes our attention away from people in real life, who crave our recognition, and gives it to people on the internet who don’t care about our attention or recognition nearly as much. We can only have our own personhood affirmed by others who we know and respect, and so the acclaim of unnamed online masses will never be as satisfying as the acclaim of named, embodied individuals. As Hayes writes, “the star seeks recognition and gets attention,” and the rest of us get neither.

     Hayes’ big solution to the problem, among others, is to subscribe to a physical newspaper. I think this is a great idea. In the book, Hayes points out how much better the New York Times is in print than online, a comparison borne out in my personal experience. Reading the book has made me want to subscribe to a real newspaper for a weekly read. He argues print news should go the way of vinyl, and interested people should bring it back for a healthier news diet.

Miscellaneous:

• One thing Hayes mentioned that wasn’t mentioned by Haidt (as far as I can remember) is the infinite scroll, which replaced the forcing function of having to decide to continue on to the next web page with a smooth “feed” of content.