And again: attention, attention, attention!
- sciart0
- Apr 23
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "A friend of mine once told me that:
“You are where your attention is.”
That line always stuck with me.
It was a reminder that the most important choice we all make is also the most common one. It’s the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to.
One of the primary features of this age of the internet and smartphones and algorithmic feeds is that our attention is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because we’re endlessly pushed around by a parade of distractions. Your phone is ringing, your Apple Watch is blinking, you got a ping on Slack from a coworker, you’re getting an email notification as you’re sitting down for dinner… it’s always something.
This level of distraction is not an accident. Our devices have engineered the incessant need for stimulus and a whole industry has emerged that’s devoted to capturing our attention and then selling it to the highest bidder.
Chris Hayes is the host of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the author of a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
The discourse on attention is, shall we say, crowded, but Hayes makes an interesting — and novel — argument about how the rearranging of social and economic life around the pursuit of attention represents “a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism!”'