This is the monthly wrap-up of book club get it, along with all the posts for the month, in your inbox for free by clicking that link. Next month I’ve got a busy month of travel so we’re reading a shorter book, The Burnout Society (Amazon).
Early in The Siren’s Call Chris Hayes, makes a statement that embodies1 the attentional market we live inside. We’re all permanently Odysseus, wriggling on the mast listening to the Siren’s call trying to steal our attention away. Unfortunately, we’re not tied to the mast so much as holding on to it by our own choice, which means we can let go of it at any point and answer the call of any algorithm that ends up being stronger than our will power.
In this way we’re also Sisyphus pushing the rock of our focused attention up hill, for it to be captured and roll back to the bottom where we have to get behind it and break away from the calls that are stealing our attention.
Types of Attention
Hayes recognizes four types of attention. First is voluntary attention2, which is used when we choose to read a book, or watch a video. It involves active engagement instead of the default call of the siren, which is embodied by involuntary attention3. Involuntary attention is the algorithm calling to you as you scroll by a bunch of trite shit that is mildly interesting, and provides just enough shots of dopamine to keep us scrolling.
Third is the cocktail party effect4, which we all recognize because we do hear our name in a crowded room. There seems to be some background processing going on that brings certain words, or noises (like a crash) to our attention overriding whatever we were already paying attention to.
Finally is social attention5 which is our desire to pay some form of attention to others, and have others pay attention to us. This can be good, like when you’re paying attention to your partner, or it can seem like it’s good like when you get a bunch of likes/thumbsup on a social platform. When you think about how easily you give away these likes though, you realise how meaningless they are coming from other people. Can you even remember what you liked today?
Hayes feels so strongly that the current model of social attention is broken that he spends the entirety of Chapter 4 looking at it, with this being the most poignant paragraph to me.
The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses – toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes – into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways. Pg 105
Specifically the idea that impressing strangers feels close enough to real human connection that we pursue it. I noticed this recently when I wasn’t going on big bike rides, and thus wasn’t checking in on Strava all that often. None of the activity would be directed towards me, so why even bother.
Attention
We all understand intuitively that certain ideas, particularly complex or nuanced ones, require more time to communicate and parse than simple ones. And conversely the frenetic, ever-shorter little bites of communication we mostly consume these days degrade both our ability to sustain focus and the quality of thought being communicated and comprehended. Pg 201
The need for attention in part negates the ability for functional discussion of nuanced ideas and most ideas are nuanced. They have a give and take where all sides of the argument have access to part of the truth and are looking at the rest of the argument through a lens that colours the rest of their ideas in a specific way. This idea of nuance and learning to hear other sides of an argument is what Think Again, which we read last month, was all about.
Yes there are things we don’t discuss, or give air to. We don’t discuss whether racism is okay, but do we discuss how so many people have had their lives shaped in ways that lead them to see white supremacist groups as their best outlet.
Misogyny is terrible and we don’t allow discussion trying to say it’s okay to demean women and treat them as only of service to men. Do we discuss how so many young men follow Andrew Tate and view him as the saviour of manhood?
Do we talk about the steps we need to make in society to give the white supremacist and misogynist groups the room to change their minds? In most online circles all I see is people laughing about how wrong these groups are, without discussion about how economic scarcity contracts circles of social concern and if we recognize that these people feel any hope of living a good life so far out of reach that it’s impossible, then they hit the “wrong” videos and online groups, the path towards racism and misogyny is foreseeable.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, and based on the moves politicians are making it seems obvious they don’t care about the economic scarcity of so many. I do however see how many young men see any hope at a thriving life being taken away and thus contract the circle of who they consider like them and turn to violence in a misguided attempt to gain some power in a life where they feel powerless.
Attention is the substance of life
If attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be. And here we come to a foundational question that is far harder to answer than we might like it to be. What do we want to pay attention to? If we didn’t have all the technologies and corporations vying for our attention, if our attention wasn’t being commodified and extracted, what would we affirmatively pay attention to? Pg 253
This paragraph has continued to stick with me. What do I want to pay attention to? It’s not the random sexy girl that pops up on my Facebook feed when I’m trying to check for stereo equipment, but it’s hard not to click on her.
I want to pay attention to my wife and be an excellent husband that helps her fulfill her dreams. I want to hang out with my kids while they still want to read to me or want me to bounce on the trampoline with them. I want to read books, or sit and listen to good music on my stereo.
The whole discussion in the last chapter6 had me thinking of Revenge of Analog (which I have read) and The Future is Analog. I also made these notes while reading a physical book, in a notebook, while listening to a CD I inserted into my stereo. Single task devices are a lost art and they bring with them an intentionality that is lost in the convenience of your phone, which can also take notes and listen to music and take photos and chat with friends, while also often being the siren that calls you with notifications to pay attention to crap you really don’t care about but is mildly compelling.
Should you read The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes?
While Hayes is not covering entirely new ground, his look at public attention was something I hadn’t quite read in that form before. He spends a bunch of time looking at how the attention market that currently exists shapes the binary, bombastic, trolling, political discourse that shapes the world. He doesn’t really provide much in the way of a solution, outside of regulation on the feeds we follow to shape them away from a state where “dunking” on your opponents isn’t rewarded.
I found the book to be a good read, and it made me think about what I’m currently paying attention to so that I asked the question if I want to pay attention to it.
I did want to pay attention to the book at hand, and never found it lost that pull. So yes I’d recommend The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes.