Attention!

Reprinted from my business blog, because I thought you might be interested in this topic, too…

Reading Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call is a bit like going to a therapy session. This analysis of the nature of attention prompts you to reflect on your day-to-day technology use and your choices. It helps you to see more clearly the primacy of attention and the ways attention and distraction shape your life. It demonstrates how your attention is being stolen by sirens that do not have your well-being at heart.

“What began as small voices at the margins…has coalesced into something approaching an emerging consensus: things are bad, and the technologies we all use every day are the cause.”

A summation of the argument…

Many of the ideas in the book are not necessarily new, but they are substantiated and put together to form a cogent argument about why and how our attention is intentionally and belligerently being fragmented. And Hayes describes some of what we need to do to reassert our volitional choices about what we give our attention to – perhaps to more life-giving and fulfilling things. Here’s the argument:

Attention defines our life. There is no truer – or more profound – insight than the idea that where we put our attention IS our life. What we see and hear, the topics we think about, who we engage with, the things we study, how we entertain ourselves, the loved ones we love – these attention vectors are the things that form the day-to-day experience of our lives.

“If attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be.”

The attention economy conspires to monopolize that attention. Our current media landscape is almost entirely driven by monetary rewards for grabbing our attention, “iteratively, over and over.”   Keeping us on the platform, endlessly scrolling or watching or listening is the end game; there is no higher purpose. The powers-behind-the-curtain monetize by collecting data on our likes and dislikes so they can grab that attention again later and sell that information (or sell access to your eyeballs and ears) to others who want your attention.

The tech titans’ ability to pull our attention preys on deep biological instincts – the necessity to immediately check out certain loud noises, the affinity we have for responding to our name, the aversion to boredom (a.k.a. stillness, being alone with our own thoughts), the dopamine rush of the pleasant surprise, and the need to be part of a social group.

“The battle to control what we pay attention to at any given instant structures everything from our inner life (who and what we listen to, how and when we are present to those we love) to our collective public lives (which pressing matters of social concern are debated and legislated,  which are neglected; which deaths are loudly mourned, which ones are quietly forgotten). Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.”

Our most precious attention faculty – social attention – is also being corrupted. Social attention is the desire to be noticed by and to engage with others, and it is the very foundation of relationships. Social media provides the illusion of interpersonal connection by letting us have a window into lives of other people (even some we don’t know) and by providing opportunity for us to be seen, be liked, and be friends with people (many of whom don’t really know us). Heady stuff, to be sure, but no substitute for real relationships.

Being digitally connected with people lets us know what others are thinking and doing, and broadcasting our commentary on various platforms provides opportunities for others to see and like us. And now, artificial intelligence bots can simulate two-way communication. But none of this satisfies our deep need for two-way human-to-human relationships.

“The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.”

All this leads to deep isolation, disaffection, and alienation. We are able and willing to withdraw from others to our own screens rather than gather together to feel the joy of collective experience, the soul-deep satisfaction in human-to-human relationships.

Worse, the fact that attention is treated as a commodity – that our private scrolling behaviors are being manipulated and used against us – is quite disturbing. Who among us has not lamented that our private conversations seem to be trolling us across all the sites we use, that our clicks are telling some sort of weird story to algorithms and advertisers resulting in that creepy feeling of always being watched?

“The defining experience of the attention age is a specific kind of alienation. It’s a feeling that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.”

Therefore, we have to find ways to wrest back control of our own attention. What we need is to co-create different business models (how people make money) and communication channels (social media options) which allow connection without stealing attention for others’ purposes. We need to self-regulate, and possibly even globally regulate how our attention can be uniquely and deliberately targeted for capture by others.

“We are not destined to have the current form of attention capitalism forever, or even for that much longer. We can have alternate forms of markets for attention, alternate institutions, and businesses that create models different from those that now dominate. We can also create noncommercial spaces where we can pay attention to each other, our hobbies, and our interests and communities without that attention being captured, bought, and sold. And there is yet one more path forward that is more radical than these other approaches, which fundamentally relies on people voluntarily creating new alternatives. We can regulate attention.”

Through research and anecdote, Hayes makes a convincing case for the primacy of attention and for rejecting the attention-fracturing landscape we inhabit. Aside from the quality of our personal lives, these insights have implications for specific areas of interest.

Attention in learning…

Every skilled learning experience designer, facilitator and teacher recognizes that getting people’s attention is the first step toward engaging them in learning activities. We have all seen how challenging that has become as sources of distraction have multiplied. Digital feeds of all kinds exploit serial attention-grabbing techniques that wrench our minds away from the deeper dive materials (long reads, extended courses, rich videos, detailed elearning modules) that support complex and lasting learning. Indeed, they condition us to want more of the dopamine drip of short, light, narrow snippets.

“We all understand intuitively that certain ideas, particularly complex or nuanced ones, require more time to communicate and parse than simple ones. And conversely that the frenetic, ever-shorter little bites of communication we mostly consume these days degrade both our ability to sustain focus and the quality of thought being communicated and comprehended.”

One state of attention is “flow,” where we can be completely absorbed for quite some time in what is in front of us right now. We enter flow when reading a good novel, engaging in a computer game quest, working challenging problems, having long conversations with loved ones. We also enter flow in deep learning – caught up by intellectual stimulation, hard thinking, and emerging insights.

It would be a shame to give up that deep learning in the mistaken belief that people can only pay attention to short snips.

In our current social media landscape, many people opt for the illusion of understanding based on a well-articulated tweet or TikTok rather than the richer perspective that could be gained in long form. Attention-grabbing has won out over attention-keeping.

It seems to me that L&D professionals need to become better versed in techniques for keeping attention – for catalyzing flow – and better advocates for giving learning the time it needs to sink in.

And so…

I would venture to guess that you will see yourself in Hayes’ anecdotes and examples as I did. You’ll be drawn into considering how much of your attention is being captured by online chatter, manipulated rage, useless memes, endless binge-watching, and opinion-shaping feeds – you’ll see behind the curtain and perhaps want to pull it off its rails as I do.

There are certainly times when distraction is exactly what is needed, when my mind needs to attend to something frivolous. (You, too? Fair enough.) But I’m more than ever determined to give my attention to the people and things that enrich my life and to get away from spending too many hours in those activities that I see as mostly a waste of my time: mindlessly scrolling, reading lite novels, binge watching movies, angsting over current events. I want to give attention to loving my family and friends, appreciating all kinds of beauty, letting my mind wonder freely, reading better books, making better meals, writing better essays. Easier said than done. And yet:

“Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life.”

The Sirens’ Call makes you think about what you want your life to be… it has prompted me to start my morning with a specific question: What do I need to attend to today?

All quotations are from The Sirens’ Call: How attention became the world’s most endangered resource, by Chris Hayes (2025).