Book Review
I’m almost finished with The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes and it’s interesting enough to call out here.
The book starts with an excellent explanation of what attention is and how it works. Then the book presents two analogies to use when thinking about attention.
The first one is to think of Attention as a resource that drives the economy, like labor, it is commodified, it can be monetized, marketed bought and sold. Since information is now pletiful, (there’s too much of it, really) attention is scarce, we have a limit of how much information we consume, how much we can pay attention to. So now market forces, tech companies, politicians they are all competing for our attention. Our attention has value, it yields money, power and fame.
The second one is to think of Attention like food. Humans evolved with food scarcity and now we have too much food (In the Global North Anyway) The same applies to information. We used to live with little information and now there’s too much.
We should say that The Information Age, is really the Attention Age
So what does that mean for us? We have to be careful about the information we consume. We need to make conscious choices. We all know what happens to people who eat too much junk food, we know what happens to people who watch too much Fox News. How do we keep a good information diet? I’ll let you know when I figure it out.
-JV