Attention Merchants

Chris Hayes was on the Hard Fork podcast last week summarized the current state of the internet and social media perfectly last week.

kevin roose:
"He (Chris Hayes) argues that we are trapped in a system of attention gathering and maximization that we didn’t construct, that we don’t have a lot of choice over. And that has created a feeling of alienation among many of the people, who feel their attention being pulled in ways that they maybe don’t want it to be."

casey newton:
"Yeah, it does feel like a condition of modern life that maybe even on most days, you will find yourself doing something and think to yourself, I don’t even want to be looking at the thing I’m looking at. And yet, I’m not sure how I can look away."

Chris would later go on to quote the quote I wanted to start this new media journey with but was afraid to because I felt like it was one of those everyone quotes it but no one really knows what it means quotes. But given that Chris did a ton of research around this subject and still felt compelled to use it, then I will follow his lead and start off The Amateur's Guide to Life following Chris.

chris hayes
"I think about it all the time. I mean, there’s a long chapter in the book about boredom, which to me is the central seed of the demand-side question. Why don’t we want to be alone with our own thoughts? Fundamentally, that’s the question. Why do we have such demand for our attention to be taken?

And that, I think, is both a situational question because I think different forms of living, social arrangements, institutions, and technologies, expand or contract our threshold for boredom, but also a very old human one. I mean, Pascal in “Pensées” in the 17th century says, I have concluded that all the troubles of man stem from his inability to sit alone in his own chamber."

Other Notes:

• The term 'attention economy' feels like its been around for awhile but Chris also uses the term 'attention merchant' which I feel like my teenage sons would approve of.
• The rest of the Pascal dialogue is also spot on and something I think about a lot. We think things are so awful now, but we have gone through many paradigm changing shifts. Horses to cars. Cars to planes. No phones to cel phones.
  
  "Now, he didn’t have TikTok. He didn’t even have TV. He didn’t have radio. And yet, that sense of restlessness is there in the 17th century. So part of this is the lot of being a human, sitting in this one mind we have with its whirling consciousness and the fact that we have to deal with those own thoughts. And the demand comes from that. It’s speaking to something essential in us.
  
  Like, very clearly, if you gave Blaise Pascal TikTok, or the people he’s writing about in the 17th century, they would have been like, hell, yes, dude. Like, give it to me."
• "There’s an anthropologist who studies Aboriginal people in Australia who I quote in the book. And among the Warlpiri people, which is their name, they don’t have a word for boredom. And when they have to describe it, they use the English word. It’s a literal import. And it’s an import both as a lexeme and as an experience."
• This BBC article goes deeper into boredom and the Warlpiri tribe.
• To digress for a moment, this is also connected to the discussion about Eskimos and words for snow. From Wikipedia "The hypothesis of linguistic relativity put forth by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, holds that the language we speak both affects and reflects our view of the world." But as the commenter in this Reddit post notes, skiers have lots of words for different kinds of snow, and as a surfer, the same applies for surf conditions.