Review by Jacob Pleasants

The idea that we live in an attention economy is fairly uncontroversial. We might think of influencers who manage to turn the (fickle) attention of their followers into a livelihood. Or the tech giants who sell advertisements on their attention-grabbing platforms. These attentional economic activities are the bedrock of our media and communication technologies.

Chris Hayes knows what it’s like to be on the inside of the attention economy. As the host of a cable news show, he lives the attention economy, with all its ups and downs. In The Sirens’ Call, Hayes puts those experiences to use, but it’s a book that’s about much more than news media. It’s about what the impacts of this attention economy have been for us as individuals and as a society. To investigate this topic, though, we will need a much more precise and detailed understanding of what we mean by “attention” as well as “attention economy.” 

Hayes begins by addressing the question of attention. Drawing upon a long history of social sciences research, he explores what attention is and how it works. That research reveals how attention is at once intuitive and fiendishly complex. At a rudimentary level, attention is a “tuning out” process, a narrowing of our sensory scope. And yet, we can never fully ignore our surroundings. A loud crash or even our own name will easily grab our focus. To account for these phenomena, Hayes explains that attention can be voluntary, involuntary, and social. Voluntary attention is sustained and deliberate; it’s what we give to a conversation, a book, or craft project. Involuntary attention describes what happens when our focus is captured by a novel stimulus such as a siren or bang. Social attention is its own peculiar phenomenon - the special experience that we have of giving and receiving attention to other people. 

Once we know how these forms of attention work, we can start to understand how our technologies interact with us on an attentional level and affect our experience in the world. For instance, take the experience of boredom, derived from a lack of substance upon which to direct our attention. Hayes memorably relates his childhood experience of profound boredom at the breakfast table. Left with a poverty of stimulation, he was relegated to reading the back of the cereal box over and over again. (Same, Chris, same. The back of the Lucky Charms box never got any more interesting.) But surely we no longer lack stimulation in a world where we are surrounded by screens. Have we not managed to vanquish this loathsome experience?

Sadly, it’s not so simple. The problem is that there is an attentional analog of the “hedonic treadmill.” We fend off boredom through stimulation, but greater amounts of stimulation ratchet up our expectations, thus making it easier to become bored. Our access to diversions has never been greater, but our expectations have risen alongside our attentional toys.

The ways that our modern technologies interact with social attention is especially consequential. Digital social media only “work” because humans seem to be highly attuned to this kind of attention. We find other people endlessly interesting, but what really grabs our attention is when other people are attending to us. The tech companies know this, and they are pretty darn good and creating platforms that exploit our tendencies.

These discussions echo several other recent works that address similar issues and concerns. Hayes cites both Jenny Odell’s (2020) How to Do Nothing as well as Johann Hari’s (2022) Stolen Focus as sources. The subject of boredom - and our inability to vanquish it - is also taken up recently by Christine Rosen’s (2024) The Extinction of Experience. So, Hayes is covering some familiar territory, but his examination of the attention economy pushes the analysis in some different directions.

At bottom, the idea of the attention economy requires that we see attention as a resource. In this economic form, attention is treated as if it were a commodity, bought and sold in fungible quantities (clicks, viewers, etc.). And like any resource, it must be extracted - in this case, from humans. Extraction, though, is always a rather violent process, and this is no exception. The ever-increasing demand for a finite resource that exists in humans is what ultimately gives rise to the many problems that Hayes describes.

The attention economy, it turns out, is full of contradictions. Even while those vying for attention are constantly in the thrall of metrics, there is also an understanding that this is all something of a facade. Attention is not actually a commodity, nor is it so easily quantified. Viewers are not interchangeable, clicks are not equal. Treating them as such warps the actions of all involved in the attention economy. And it is deeply dehumanizing and alienating for those whose attention has been transformed into a mere commodity. As a cable TV host, Hayes is on the “inside” of this system in some sense, but he is just as much a cog as the viewer and no more able to escape the logics of the attention machine. In fact, he might even be less able to escape; the viewer can always turn the TV off.

But even if we turn off the TV, proverbially or literally, we cannot really escape the attention economy. It has encroached on just about every corner of our society. In the latter part of the book, Hayes explicates how many social ills have their roots in the contest for attention. One central problem is that, inevitably, an extraordinarily unproductive and maladaptive arms race will ensue over attention. When the demand for attention rises, you can’t very well go and mine more of it as if it were, say, iron or lead. To be sure, companies are always trying to locate more supplies of attention by colonizing more and more of our lives (for instance, how about you try on these new augmented reality glasses? Don’t you want to wear them all the time?). But this is just another indication of the harms caused by the ceaseless arms race. 

Fortunately, Hayes does not believe all this to be inevitable. While mainstream technologies seem to be on the attention-fueled trajectory toward the death spiral of enshittification, it need not be so. He is heartened, for instance, by the various ways that people have chosen more deliberate ways of being. Instead of succumbing to the attentional capture of music streaming, there is a resurgence of interest in vinyl records of all things. There are still physical newspapers that are actually pretty darn great. And group message chats with friends and family are a growing mode of communication that sidesteps the attentional misery of the platforms. He doesn’t think we’ll be able to get ourselves out of this mess through individual decision-making; regulation will need to be part of the solution, as messy as that will be.

One conceptual issue I would like to raise is that I am not so convinced that attention can be conceptualized as a resource in the same way as, say, oil or water or iron. It is true that like those material resources, attention is a necessary component for all sorts of processes and actions and outcomes. You can’t make a sale without the attention of the buyer and the seller. You can’t get from one place to another. You can’t earn someone’s vote.

And yet, attention has some peculiar properties, not the least of which is its temporality. I might be able to capture your attention for a time, but I cannot do so indefinitely. We might say that you lend your attention, and that you can reclaim it at any time. It is fundamentally ephemeral. While there are things that humans can do with attention, it also doesn’t seem quite right to say that attention is used in the same way that we use resources like water or oil or even money. In a commercial interaction, attention is what allows exchanges to occur, but it seems to primarily play an enabling role. Attention is therefore more like a chemical catalyst: it contributes to the action but is not itself consumed or changed.

Quoting Herbert Simon, Hayes suggests otherwise. “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients” (Simon, 1971, p. 40). Yet when considering questions of information flow, I am still not so sure that attention plays the role of resource. My attention is what enables me to interact with information. And indeed, my attention is finite, and thus when I interact with information, my attention can, for some period of time, be wholly occupied (consumed) by that information. And yet, it’s not clear that thinking about my attention as a resource is quite the right way forward.

Although I am uneasy with conceptualizing attention as a resource, I can nevertheless mostly get on board with Hayes’s argument. Regardless of the ontological status of attention, the attention economy treats attention as if it were a resource. We can thus critique the attention economy on its own assumptions.

Considering the book as a whole, The Sirens’ Call offers a way of analyzing and critiquing a range of issues that emerge at the intersection of society, technology, and everyday life. While Hayes is not at all the first to speak of “the attention economy” and its ill effects (e.g., Simon, 1971), he pulls together many distinct threads into a rich and highly applicable explanatory framework. 

While Hayes only briefly addresses educational settings in the book, his ideas are highly applicable to schools. Indeed, one of the observations he makes about schools is that if a teacher has to compete for students’ attention with myriad attention-grabbing devices, the outcomes will be predictably poor. Thinking about the ways that technologies have affected classrooms by upending their attentional dynamics seems like an excellent starting point for inquiry.

Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.