THE SIRENS' CALL

A respected cable news host explains why new technologies make it ever harder to concentrate.

The public exchange of ideas, dominated by internet platforms that elevate outrage-inducing content and by smartphones that deliver it to us nonstop, is roiled by a “burbling, insistent ruckus” suggestive of “acute mental illness.” So contends the MSNBC prime-time mainstay, a one-time print journalist whose facility for lucid synthesis is put to gratifying use in this smart, constructive book. It’s not breaking news that idiocy and sensationalism are rewarded by the commercial imperatives of what Hayes calls “the attention economy,” but “even the most panicked critics” underestimate the “scale of transformation,” he argues. Seizing small, sequential parcels of our attention for as long as we continue to scroll, social media platforms and extremely popular first-person shooter games operate on an insidious “slot machine model.” He carefully charts how the churning monetization of attention has fundamentally changed news, politics, and leisure time, turning our communications landscape into a kind of “failed state” where common-sense norms have been routed by “attentional warlordism.” Amid the virtual maelstrom, Hayes wants to help readers reclaim a measure of mental tranquility. Some of his ideas are restrained; others, likely controversial. Small, purposeful acts of resistance—reading print newspapers, forgoing smartphones in favor of old-fashioned “dumb phones”—can impede the tech industry’s “endless attention commodification,” he writes. He also points readers to grassroots groups fighting the so-called infinite scroll. More boldly, he suggests that governmental oversight of labor issues could serve as a model for “regulation of attention markets,” which might include “a mandatory, legislated hard cap on” smartphone screen time and apps. An army of Silicon Valley lobbyists will surely beg to differ.

An intelligent, forward-looking analysis of our increasing inability to stay focused.