The Sirens' Call

This is a book about the attention economy and what smart phones and social media are doing to our minds, our relationships and to public discourse in general. There are several other books which address this topic, but this book is unique because of the way Chris Hayes goes about addressing these issues.

He doesn’t just lay out what social media companies are doing, he offers a compelling account of what it is in us that makes us so susceptible to them. He goes into history, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology in an attempt to explain how our fundamental biological, neurological and social impulses are being used against us.

The through-line of the narrative is the fact that attention is the stuff of life, what we pay attention to moment to moment, what we focus on, ultimately makes up our lives. And it is this intrinsic part of our being that has become an extractable product, something that can be mined and sold over and over again.

The impact of this on our personal lives is profound, and it goes beyond the fact that we’re constantly distracted and that we’re struggling to focus. The fight for our attention is, at its core, the fight for control over our inner lives – the very essence of what makes us human. Hayes argues that this is a fight that we can win once we know exactly how we’re being manipulated.

He lays out the way our relationships are being impacted by our screens, personalised social media feeds, and the relative lack of shared cultural experiences. He reflects on his own screen free childhood and indulges in a bit of nostalgia that felt necessary to me, in the sense that there are some things that we used to do pre-internet that maybe we should bring back into our lives instead of letting technology carry us wither it will.

This book is full of ideas, insights and anecdotes and it tells an overarching story about the world we’ve ended up in, and the way we got here. It's an excellent read.