Great question. If we take the skeptics seriously, how much of the catastrophist’s argument stands? Enough, Hayes feels, that we should be gravely concerned. “We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit,” he writes. Thinking clearly and conversing reasonably under these conditions is “like trying to meditate in a strip club.” The case he makes is thoughtful, informed, and disquieting. But is it convincing?
History is littered with lamentations about distraction. Swirling lights and strippers are not a new problem. What’s important to note about bygone debates on the subject, though, is that they truly were debates. Not everyone felt the sky was falling, and the dissenters raised pertinent questions. Is it, in fact, good to pay attention? Whose purposes does it serve? (...)
This situation is, in some sense, our fault, as the whole system runs on our own choices. But those choices don’t always feel free. Hayes distinguishes between voluntary and compelled attention. Some things we focus on by choice; others, because of our psychological hardwiring, we find hard to ignore. Digital tools let online platforms harness the latter, addressing our involuntary impulses rather than our higher-order desires. The algorithms deliver what we want but not, as the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it, “what we want to want.”
Getting what we want, not what we want to want: it could be the slogan of our times. Hayes notes that it’s not only corporations that home in on our baser instincts. Since social-media users also have access to immediate feedback, they learn what draws eyeballs, too. Years ago, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kanye West had hardly anything in common. Now their pursuit of publicity has morphed them into versions of the same persona—the attention troll. And, despite ourselves, we can’t look away.
The painful twist is that climate change, the thing we really ought to focus on, “evades our attentional faculties,” Hayes writes. “It’s always been a problem,” the writer and activist Bill McKibben told him, “that the most dangerous thing on the planet is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and doesn’t actually do anything to you directly.” Global warming is the opposite of Kanye West: we want to pay attention but we don’t.
The trouble is “attention capitalism,” Hayes argues, and it has the same dehumanizing effect on consumers’ psyches as industrial capitalism has on workers’ bodies. Successful attention capitalists don’t hold our attention with compelling material but, instead, snatch it over and over with slot-machine gimmicks. (...)
What’s awkward about this whole debate is that, though we speak freely of “attention spans,” they are not the sort of thing that psychologists can measure, independent of context, across time. And studies of the ostensible harm that carrying smartphones does to cognitive abilities have been contradictory and inconclusive. A.D.H.D. diagnoses abound, but is that because the condition is growing more prevalent or the diagnosis is? U.S. labor productivity and the percentage of the population with four years or more of college have risen throughout the Internet era. (...)
After decades of the Internet, the mediascape has still not dissolved into a froth of three-second clips of orgasms, kittens, and trampoline accidents, interspersed with sports-betting ads. As the legal scholar Tim Wu argues in “The Attention Merchants,” the road to distraction is not one-way. Yes, businesses seize our attention using the shiniest lures available, but people become inured and learn to ignore them. Or they recoil, which might explain why meditation, bird-watching, and vinyl records are in vogue. Technology firms, in fact, often attract users by promising to reduce distractions, not only the daily hassles—paying bills, arranging travel—but the online onslaught, too. Google’s text ads and mail filters offered respite from the early Internet’s spam and pop-ups. Apple became one of the world’s largest companies by selling simplicity.
Besides, distraction is relative: to be distracted from one thing is to attend to another. And any argument that people are becoming distracted must deal with the plain fact that many spend hours staring intently at their screens. What is doomscrolling if not avid reading? If people are failing to focus in some places, they’re clearly succeeding in others. (...)
Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers.
What’s going on? The media theorist Neil Verma, in “Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession,” describes the era of TikTok’s rise as beset by “obsession culture.” Online media, by broadening the scope of possible interests, have given rise to an unabashedly nerdy intellectual style. Verma focusses on the breakout podcast “Serial,” whose first season, in 2014, followed the host for hours as she pored over the details of a fifteen-year-old murder case. But deep dives into niche topics have become the norm. The wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan runs marathon interviews, some exceeding four hours, on ancient civilizations, cosmology, and mixed martial arts. A four-hour video of the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson dissecting the design flaws of a defunct Disney World hotel has eleven million views (deservedly: it’s terrific). Hayes himself confesses to spending hours “utterly transfixed” by watching old carpets being shampooed. (...)
We blame the Internet for polarizing politics and shredding attention spans, but those tendencies actually pull in opposite directions. What’s true of culture is true of politics, too: as people diverge from the mainstream, they become obsessional and prone to scrambling down rabbit holes. Following QAnon takes the sort of born-again devotion that one expects of a K-pop fan. Democratic Socialists, vaccine skeptics, anti-Zionists, manosphere alphas—these are not people known for casual political engagement. Some may be misinformed, but they’re not uninformed: “Do your own research” is the mantra of the political periphery. Fragmentation, it turns out, yields subcultural depths. Silos are not shallows. (...)
In a sense, what attention alarmists seek is protection from a competition that they’re losing. Fair enough; the market doesn’t always deliver great results, and Hayes is right to deplore the commodification of intellectual life. But one can wonder whether ideas are less warped by the market when they are posted online to a free platform than when they are rolled into books, given bar codes, and sold in stores. It’s worth remembering that those long nineteenth-century novels we’re losing the patience to read were long for a reason: profit-seeking publishers made authors drag out their stories across multiple volumes. Market forces have been stretching, squashing, spinning, and suppressing ideas for centuries. Realistically, the choice isn’t commodified versus free but which commodity form suits best.
For Hayes, what makes the apps awful is that they operate without consent. They seize attention using tricks, leaving us helpless and stupefied. Yet even this argument, his most powerful, warrants caution. Our media have always done a weird dance with our desires. Although Hayes argues for the profound novelty of our predicament, the title of his book, “The Sirens’ Call,” alludes to a Homeric tale from antiquity, of songs too alluring to resist. This isn’t always unwelcome. Consider our highest words of praise for books—captivating, commanding, riveting, absorbing, enthralling. It’s a fantasy of surrendered agency. (“A page-turner”: the pages turn themselves.) Oddly, the thing we deplore in others, submission, is what we most want for ourselves.
The nightmare the alarmists conjure is of a TikTok-addled screen-ager. This isn’t a full picture of the present, though, and it might not reveal much about the future, either. Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis.
by Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker | Read more:
The painful twist is that climate change, the thing we really ought to focus on, “evades our attentional faculties,” Hayes writes. “It’s always been a problem,” the writer and activist Bill McKibben told him, “that the most dangerous thing on the planet is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and doesn’t actually do anything to you directly.” Global warming is the opposite of Kanye West: we want to pay attention but we don’t.
The trouble is “attention capitalism,” Hayes argues, and it has the same dehumanizing effect on consumers’ psyches as industrial capitalism has on workers’ bodies. Successful attention capitalists don’t hold our attention with compelling material but, instead, snatch it over and over with slot-machine gimmicks. (...)
What’s awkward about this whole debate is that, though we speak freely of “attention spans,” they are not the sort of thing that psychologists can measure, independent of context, across time. And studies of the ostensible harm that carrying smartphones does to cognitive abilities have been contradictory and inconclusive. A.D.H.D. diagnoses abound, but is that because the condition is growing more prevalent or the diagnosis is? U.S. labor productivity and the percentage of the population with four years or more of college have risen throughout the Internet era. (...)
After decades of the Internet, the mediascape has still not dissolved into a froth of three-second clips of orgasms, kittens, and trampoline accidents, interspersed with sports-betting ads. As the legal scholar Tim Wu argues in “The Attention Merchants,” the road to distraction is not one-way. Yes, businesses seize our attention using the shiniest lures available, but people become inured and learn to ignore them. Or they recoil, which might explain why meditation, bird-watching, and vinyl records are in vogue. Technology firms, in fact, often attract users by promising to reduce distractions, not only the daily hassles—paying bills, arranging travel—but the online onslaught, too. Google’s text ads and mail filters offered respite from the early Internet’s spam and pop-ups. Apple became one of the world’s largest companies by selling simplicity.
Besides, distraction is relative: to be distracted from one thing is to attend to another. And any argument that people are becoming distracted must deal with the plain fact that many spend hours staring intently at their screens. What is doomscrolling if not avid reading? If people are failing to focus in some places, they’re clearly succeeding in others. (...)
Even the supposedly attention-pulverizing TikTok deserves another look. Hayes, who works in TV, treats TikTok wholly as something to watch—an algorithmically individualized idiot box. But TikTok is participatory: more than half its U.S. adult users have posted videos. Where the platform excels is not in slick content but in amateur enthusiasm, which often takes the form of trends with endless variations. To join in, TikTokers spend hours preparing elaborate dance moves, costume changes, makeup looks, lip synchs, trick shots, pranks, and trompe-l’oeil camera maneuvers.
What’s going on? The media theorist Neil Verma, in “Narrative Podcasting in an Age of Obsession,” describes the era of TikTok’s rise as beset by “obsession culture.” Online media, by broadening the scope of possible interests, have given rise to an unabashedly nerdy intellectual style. Verma focusses on the breakout podcast “Serial,” whose first season, in 2014, followed the host for hours as she pored over the details of a fifteen-year-old murder case. But deep dives into niche topics have become the norm. The wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan runs marathon interviews, some exceeding four hours, on ancient civilizations, cosmology, and mixed martial arts. A four-hour video of the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson dissecting the design flaws of a defunct Disney World hotel has eleven million views (deservedly: it’s terrific). Hayes himself confesses to spending hours “utterly transfixed” by watching old carpets being shampooed. (...)
We blame the Internet for polarizing politics and shredding attention spans, but those tendencies actually pull in opposite directions. What’s true of culture is true of politics, too: as people diverge from the mainstream, they become obsessional and prone to scrambling down rabbit holes. Following QAnon takes the sort of born-again devotion that one expects of a K-pop fan. Democratic Socialists, vaccine skeptics, anti-Zionists, manosphere alphas—these are not people known for casual political engagement. Some may be misinformed, but they’re not uninformed: “Do your own research” is the mantra of the political periphery. Fragmentation, it turns out, yields subcultural depths. Silos are not shallows. (...)
In a sense, what attention alarmists seek is protection from a competition that they’re losing. Fair enough; the market doesn’t always deliver great results, and Hayes is right to deplore the commodification of intellectual life. But one can wonder whether ideas are less warped by the market when they are posted online to a free platform than when they are rolled into books, given bar codes, and sold in stores. It’s worth remembering that those long nineteenth-century novels we’re losing the patience to read were long for a reason: profit-seeking publishers made authors drag out their stories across multiple volumes. Market forces have been stretching, squashing, spinning, and suppressing ideas for centuries. Realistically, the choice isn’t commodified versus free but which commodity form suits best.
For Hayes, what makes the apps awful is that they operate without consent. They seize attention using tricks, leaving us helpless and stupefied. Yet even this argument, his most powerful, warrants caution. Our media have always done a weird dance with our desires. Although Hayes argues for the profound novelty of our predicament, the title of his book, “The Sirens’ Call,” alludes to a Homeric tale from antiquity, of songs too alluring to resist. This isn’t always unwelcome. Consider our highest words of praise for books—captivating, commanding, riveting, absorbing, enthralling. It’s a fantasy of surrendered agency. (“A page-turner”: the pages turn themselves.) Oddly, the thing we deplore in others, submission, is what we most want for ourselves.
The nightmare the alarmists conjure is of a TikTok-addled screen-ager. This isn’t a full picture of the present, though, and it might not reveal much about the future, either. Ours is an era of obsession as much as distraction, of long forms as much as short ones, of zeal as much as indifference. To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis.
by Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Plunkert
[ed. A nice cogent rebuttal to the attention deficit argument recently making the rounds. To better understand the default proposition, see: Attention is Power (and the Problem) (NYT/DS).]
