This was kind of an adult version of The Anxious Generation (Jonathan Haidt) only, not so much anxiety....but the root of it all is the same...everything fighting for our attention.
In This Age of Information, attention is what everyone is fighting for. We need to be wise about what we give our attention to. He says instead of the information age, we should call it the attention age. Ironically, I had a hard time following all the time I listened (he's REALLY thorough) but he does make some good points and interesting connections through history. His recommendation is to be really vigilant about how we spend our time and attention - more reading, more walking, more quiet!
Five key take aways:
1. The Attention Economy Thrives on Distraction and Outrage – The stuff that makes people explode is what gets shared and therefore the majority of our focus.
2. Our Ability to Focus Has Diminished – Shorter articles, shorter videos, shorter speeches. We have really lost our ability for deep thought, deep reading and deep conversation.
3. Toxic Attention-Seeking Behaviors Dominate Public Discourse – Meaning conversation is thwarted by trolls, conspiracy theories and whataboutism. People like Donald Trump have mastered the art of attracting attention at any cost, using positive or negative outrage to stay in the public consciousness.
4. Attention is Both Exploited and Inherently Human – Businesses are set up to make money off of our focus. Since humans seem to naturally seek attention for validation and connection. Social media exploits this. It makes us think we have connections - but truthfully, it's a shallow and unsatisfying connection and actually is just increasing loneliness and isolation.
5. Fixing this can be done on an individual level but may also require a social shirt – We can make changes in our own life like choosing to read print newspapers or using "dumb phones" as well as spending more time reading and discussing. We may also need systemic changes, like government regulation on social media and other platforms.
Goodreads says:
An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society
“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.” —New York Times
“Brilliant book… Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.”—Rachel Maddow
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.
Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
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