About Today’s Title

Today’s book review title is the name of (and a line from) the 1977 song by Cheap Trick. I immediately thought of this song when asking myself which musical track would best fit the subject of today’s book - which is all about the “attention economy”. I think the title of the song captures the need for attention perfectly.

When I started googling for facts about the song, and about Chris Hayes, the author of today’s book, I figured out that the song is actually two years older than Hayes. Why do I feel so old right about now? 🙂 

Anyway, you can find Cheap Trick playing the song on this YouTube video, while on tour in Japan. Yep, the same tour that led to the Live from Budokan album that introduced me and my fellow rockin’ teenagers to the band, and to this song, way back in 1979.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has been a writer and political commentator for a long time. He began his career as a journalist at the Chicago Reader, an independent weekly in the Windy City, where he spent four years after the turn of the century. After that he moved on to the progressive, labor-focused magazine In These Times, and then to The Nation, the long-running progressive magazine founded by abolitionists in 1865. Hayes, you can see, has solid lefty / progressive credentials.

He’s also a pretty sharp guy, able to not only articulate (mainly) progressive ideas, but dive deep into their history and help us understand why they make sense.

In The Siren’s Call Hayes turns his sharp mind to the question of what it is that is driving all media, but particularly social media, to maximize confrontation and feed political discord. In Hayes’ view, it all comes down to attention, and what he terms the attention economy.

Hayes writes about social media in the first chapter, arguing back and forth whether concerns about “screen time” along with the concern about the amount of control many feel that social media has over their time, is the concern of a curmudgeon, or “broadly correct”. In the end he sides with “broadly correct”. There is something different, and NOT GOOD, about today’s social media offerings. And what’s not good about them is that they are stealing our attention.

Hayes follows with a lengthy argument for why social media is truly something new and bad. I’ll just get to the point and say that I felt the argument was too long. I’m not sure it took a book to say what needs to be said on this topic. But I did love listening to Hayes’ narration of the audiobook. He has a speaking voice that carries you to the point and drives it home.

One of the most convincing points in his argument, for me at least, came in the sixth chapter of the book where Hayes quotes a Nobel Prize winning economist named Herbert Simon. Simon wrote a paper way back in 1971 where he argued that in the then-new “Information Age” attention was the key.

“In an information-rich world,” Simon wrote, “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.” And since our “attention” is another word for our time and our focus - the very things that make up our lives, it follows that what social media is consuming is our lives.

Isn’t that the way it feels sometimes?

In the final chapter of the book Hayes offers his own insights into how to reclaim our time, focus and attention in a social media world. There is hope. We live in a specific point in time where the titans of social media may seem unstoppable. But, at some point, they will lose our attention to something else and thus lose their power. Our time and the media environment will move on. It’s really up to all of us to make that happen.

While I had mixed feelings about the book - good points, too long - I have to say that I loved listening to Hayes’ narration. I’d recommend the audiobook version to anyone looking to pick this one up.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: Hayes’ deep dive into the “attention economy” is cogent and informative, if in fact a deeper dive than necessary to get the point across. I loved listening to Hayes’ narration of the audiobook.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I listened to the audiobook version which I borrowed from my local library through the Libby app.