ACROSS SOCIAL MEDIA you’ll find sped-up videos of people sitting and doing nothing. They settle in alone, with no phones, and simply sit with their thoughts. The figures in these videos are trying to retrain their attention spans. After years of mindlessly scrolling through social media, they now film themselves, clasping their hands, tapping their thumbs, closing their eyes.
In The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, author and political commentator Chris Hayes argues that technology firms are deliberately chipping away at our ability to focus. He details how our attention spans and value systems have been reoriented and commodified for financial gain. Attention “is the foundation for nearly all we do,” he writes, “from the relationships we build to the way we act as workers, consumers, and citizens.”
Our attention is precious and we need to protect it, to draw it close. As inherently curious individuals, the deep dive of doom-scrolling harms us. It cuts to the deepest part of us, the inquisitive part, which can’t contend with the infinite content overload of social media.
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