The Siren's Call

Earlier this year, my wife and I attended a lecture by Chris Hayes, Emmy Award-winning host of "All In with Chris Hayes" on MSNBC.  Hayes was touring in support of his new book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.  I've never actually watched Chris Hayes, but I thought he was a good speaker.  I ended up reading the book, which I also enjoyed.  He wrote an article based, in part, on his book for The Atlantic, "You're Being Alienated From Your Own Attention".  Hayes claims that "Attention is a kind of resource: It has value, and if you can seize it, you seize that value."  He goes on to suggest that "Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention."

The Canadian-American journalist Robert MacNeil was perhaps best known for co-founding (with fellow journalist Jim Lehrer) the public television news program, the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, which aired from 1975-1995 (the show has since been renamed the PBS News Hour).  MacNeil wrote an essay in 1993 entitled "The Trouble with Television" (you can find it relatively easily on the Internet).  He raises many of the same issues that Neil Postman wrote about in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public discourse in the Age of Show Business, which I discussed in a recent post (see "Amusing Ourselves to Death...").  

MacNeil wrote, "The trouble with television is that it discourages concentration.  Almost anything interesting and rewarding in life requires some constructive, consistently applied effort...but television encourages us to apply no effort.  It sells us instant gratification.  It diverts us only to divert, to make the time pass without pain...In short, a lot of television usurps one of the most precious of all human gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively surrender it."

There is a fight for our attention.  And we are losing.  Hayes writes, "Those who successfully extract it [attention] command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes.  The battle to control what we pay attention to at any given instant structures our inner life - who and what we listen to, how and when we are present to those we love - and our collective public lives: which pressing matters of social concern are debated and legislated, which are neglected..."  

I've caught myself in the past "doom-scrolling" through various social media sites and wasting precious time that could have been better spent on a more productive activity.  I started to find that a lot of what I was reading was garbage, which prompted me to quit both X and Facebook a few months ago (see my post "Liberation").  

I think I agree with most of the arguments that Chris Hayes makes in his book.  He admits that his job is to capture our attention, and certainly most (if not all) media today is all about capturing attention.  Like Hayes, I'm not sure that there is a straightforward and easy fix to this dilemma.  We've been traveling down this road for quite some time (hence the article by Jim Lehrer that appeared over 30 years ago).  I think the first step is to recognize and clearly state the problem, if any, that we are needing to solve.  Once the problem is recognized, the next step is to begin a frank dialogue about the problem itself.  Once there, we can start talking about potential solutions.