9: The Power of Attention

Thinking about Ezra Klein's podcast episode, "Attention Is Power."

My dog, to capture your attention

“No company better exemplifies the internet-age dictum that if the product is free, you are the product.”

John Lanchester, “You Are the Product,” London Review of Books Vol. 39, No. 16, 17 August 2017, referring to Facebook, now Meta.

I owe the happy conduct of my life as a soloist partially to the internet. I first signed up for an electronic mail account in 1985, when I entered grad school at the University of Toronto. Not many civilians had access to email then. Fortunately, U of T had a strong computer science faculty, and the university made email available to its students early on. The longevity of the friendships I made at the Centre for Medieval Studies depended on the nearly instantaneous contact with my fellow grad students after we finished our degrees. A few of us were early adapters of a chat program. I can still recall the feeling of enchantment I felt when I first saw our messages piling on top of each other as they scrolled up the screen, similar to how we talked over each other in real life. Shifting our conversations to the internet felt organic, as if we had always been conversing in that way. I began typing up my dissertation on a word processing program in 1991 and emailed the faculty on my committee to schedule its defense in mid-1992. While I taught at Arizona State University in the late 90s, email infiltrated my relationships with my students. When I moved to northern California in 2000, I had more long-distance correspondences than ever. In other words, I’m as close to being a digital native as is possible for a nearly 70-year-old who isn’t Bill Gates.

I opened a Facebook account within a few years of its inception in 2004. I also signed up for some early social media. As soon as they were semi-affordable, I bought a cell phone. I opened multiple email accounts with different services in an effort to compartmentalize my work and social correspondences. The internet felt integrated into my life in a way that made the most and reinforced the best of my solo life.

Recently, I’ve been trying to remember when my connections to social media began to sour. It started long before 2016. Maybe it started when I opened an FB account. I recognized that it would be a sinkhole of time lost to — what? I immediately disliked the clever banter, each voice attempting to out-wit the other. The rise of the selfie on SnapChat (which I never used) and Instagram made the ego instead of perception the focal point.¹ And in exchange for participating in FB and Instagram we are pinned to our chairs so that the ads can insinuate themselves into our field of vision.

As Chris Hayes points out in this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show,” this isn’t new. Newspapers and magazines could never support themselves on subscriptions alone. Instead, they sold their readers’ attention to advertisers. Print advertising turned readers into products no less than social media do today. How does Meta make its profit? It sells your attention to advertisers.

A noticeable strand in Klein and Hayes’s conversation touches on a point they say the Democrats’ are missing. Klein noted:

There are places where money is very powerful, but it’s usually where people are not looking. Money is very powerful when there’s not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money — he controls them with attention.

Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics, and the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics.

In response, Hayes elaborates:

The further up you go from [local elections], to Senate to president, the more attention there is already, the less the money counts.

Independent of the cogency of their remarks, Klein and Hayes are discussing our attention in a way that seems to assume we, the populace and electorate, passively surrender our attention. I guess we do. The question becomes, how do we regain agency over our attention? Or is it too late? An easy solution would be to avert our gaze from advertisers, analogous to workers withholding their labor to extract concessions from management. A quick glance at the state of organized labor in this country tells you right away how difficult that would be in practice. Leveraging our own attention is complicated by the great difficulty many people, myself included, would have going on a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads or Amazon diet.

It’s sad but true to point out that the attention of the majority of the population, including mine, has been narcotized, if that’s a word. Television softened us up to the capture of our attention, argues Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). At the beginning, television pinned us to our sofas while it delivered the ads between segments that entertained us. The format, not the content, the vehicle, not the rider is the problem.

I wish we had more public discussion about how to break the stranglehold on our attention. For the moment, I’m like Candide, working on my own little garden in preparation for broader solutions to come.² I’ve deleted my FB and Threads accounts, as well as Twitter. I’m left with only Blue Sky, which I rarely look at. I enjoy scrolling through Instagram, because I don’t follow political accounts. I canceled the Washington Post, but decided to keep my digital subscription to The New York Times less for the news and more for the fun features like Cooking and the puzzle. I read The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and a few other periodicals on my iPad (because I’m a nomad these days). I subscribe to more political newsletter, most of them on Substack, than I can keep up with. I vow to be more selective about the Instagram ads I click on. To this extent, I’ve taken control of my attention, if that’s even a meaningful thought.

I take heart from Klein’s soft prediction of a backlash against the Great Attention Theft (my phrasing, not his). Although it’s not clear whether the backlash will lurch right or left, his sense of a significant shift ahead feels right. Anecdotally, I know fewer people engaged in Twitter, Threads, and Blue Sky, which is good. I have a feeling that soon the journalists, pundits, trolls and bots still on Twitter, Threads, and Blue Sky will be talking only to themselves. I hope they remember to turn the lights off before they leave.

1. Erving Goffman’s insights into the presentation of the self translate well to online. However, I do appreciate the value of social media as networks of shared knowledge.

2. One of the 3 books Chris Hayes recommends at the end of Ezra Klein’s interview is Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which I’ve had my eye on for a while and is now moving to the top of my To Read list.