The door bell chimes. Two young men stand back as I open the door to greet them. They are well-groomed and well-dressed.
“What are you selling?” I ask.
“Oh no,” the senior member of the duo quickly replies. “We’re not selling anything. We’d just like to talk with you a bit.”
“Well there you have it,” I responded.
The younger one pipes in, confident that this is an area for which his lesser training has prepared him. “No, really, sir, we’re not here to sell you anything. We don’t want any money.”
“I believe you young man, that you do not want my money, but I must insist that you are most certainly selling something, and it is this: judging by the looks of you and the literature you both carry in your hands, you are here on this fine day to convince me that there is a way of this world—and the one after, I presume—of which I am likely unfamiliar. What you are selling me, my friends, is an idea, a very profound idea in your measure, or you wouldn’t be spending this fine day ringing door bells.”
“Well yes,” the older one replies timidly. “We do want to talk to you about that, but we are not asking for any money. Have you ever heard of…”
“I understand that,” I interrupt with no small degree of arrogance. “As I have mentioned, the two of you are here to sell me an idea, one I believe you are hopeful I might adopt.”
Unprepared with what they are supposed to say in the face of this, they both nod a bit and roll back on their feet.
Having a bit of experience in this type of exchange and not wishing to appear rude to these very polite fellows, I say, as a teacher might speak to a student, because that day I was selling something myself, “You, my friends, are selling an idea… and the price you demand —indeed, the fee you have already begun to collect—is my time. From the moment you rang the bell, you were asking me to set aside what it was I was previously attending to. And now, for the last few minutes, I have been speaking with you—although I must confess that it is I who have been doing much of the talking—those few minutes, those small few moments of my life, I was not doing that thing I was attending to before you arrived. And, no matter what it was I was doing, no matter how trivial or important, I was choosing to do it and, most significantly, I am no longer doing it. And the reason I am no longer doing it, is that I am here at my door choosing to spend that time with you. So, what do you two have to share with me on this beautiful day?”
Unless those two men in short sleeves and neckties were on to something with their profound idea of the afterlife, the moments of our lives are finite. For some, the moments remain many and for others the moments are few. And, even as we cannot know how many moments still await each of us, they will inevitably, some day, come to an end.
My point—if my allegory has failed to impress —is that among those free and prosperous enough, we select most of what it is to which we give our attention.
This notion of choosing the direction of our attention and that attention itself is in limited supply is put forward eloquently by MSNBC Emmy-Award winning host Chris Hayes in The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2025). Much of Hayes’ writing is thoughtful reflection upon the human condition by those who have come before. For instance, citing William James from 1890, Hayes offers a definition for attention that has stood the test of time. To wit, attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…” And here comes the kicker for Chris Hayes’ fascinating book: Giving our attention to one thing “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”
Now for the economics lesson: while many proselytizers have long been doing exactly what those two young men at my door were doing; it is only more recently someone figured out that getting the attention of others could make money.
“Attention,” Hayes proposes, “is a kind of resource: and if you can seize it you can seize the value. This has been true for a very long time. Charismatic leaders and demagogues, showmen, preachers, great salespeople, advertisers, holy men and women who rally disciples, all have used the power of attention to accrue wealth and power.”
This, of course, is what social media companies do today. But there is much more going on than the story of making money—and also gaining power—by getting our attention. To lay out his argument, Hayes offers a brief history of monetizing our attention.
The first newspaper advertisements appeared in what was to become the United States in the early 1700s. During the second half of that century, newspapers contained all manner of notices for runaway slaves, ads for goods, and a great deal of political propaganda that helped to stir American rebellion against the British (there is no revolution without getting the attention of the people, after all). It is important for this story to point out that, as Hayes notes, these “papers primarily derived their incomes from sales of the publication.” Yes, consumers paid for what they wanted, but the price paid was primarily in the form of money.
Citing a book written by Tim Wu, Hayes offers “that the first media business to truly package and sell audience attention to advertisers was the penny press, starting with The Sun, which was first published in New York City in 1833.”
He adds that, “Newspapers at the time cost about six cents, but The Sun’s founder… charged only a penny for his paper, losing money on each one, but making it up in reach.”
It was at this point that human attention became the central feature of the commerce of newspaper selling because “the paper wasn’t really the product, the audience was…”
This is the moment that set us on the path to today’s media environment. For well over a century, a newspaper’s primary source of income derived from advertisements; the means by which advertisers purchased our attention.
The Golden Age of radio in the first half of the twentieth century and the proliferation of television in the second half were also made possible through advertising. One need not pay any price for these shows except for the willingness to offer attention. This media environment actually contributed to the evolution of the wider culture which, I’ll comment upon later, is not what is happening today. Tuning in to a limited number of radio and TV programs was largely a shared experience. In the early days of television, for instance, the first family in the neighborhood to acquire a set often became a gathering spot for those nearby. Not only did the community often follow the same shows, they often viewed these shows together.
Of course, the growth of television was roundly criticized for degrading American culture. Citing Neil Postman and his Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Hayes writes that “the broad narcotic effect of the new device was making the public stupider, duller, and less capable of self-governance. ‘Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,’ Postman wrote. ‘They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.’”
This is a scathing critique of the cultural effects of television but at least most of us went down this road together.
By the 1990s, this began to change. The popularity of cable television marked the origins of the radical manner in which we now engage with the media. Individual demographic groups flocked to the cable shows and channels they preferred, whether based upon age, race, gender, or whatever. And with so many choices, it became more and more difficult for any one group to keep up with what the other groups were up to. This splintering further divided American society as each group decided to offer increasing amounts of their attention to different media experiences. This division was most pronounced through the growth of cable news, especially with the introduction of Fox News in 1996.
At the turn of the century, the internet promised the hope of virtual community spaces where we could communicate with one another across vast distances, retell our adventures, share family events and other aspects of our daily lives. And money was not the driving force that it is today.
“The earliest version of the internet, and then the one that blossomed in the late 1990s and the 2000s,” Hayes remembers fondly, “was built on a whole host of entirely noncommercial structures that allowed people to interact and build community, and share and flirt and chat and the like without any undergirding commercial interest in what they did.”
The remnant of this community based internet “we have today,” Hayes adds, “is the group chat, whether it’s family members exchanging pics of the grandkids’ Halloween costumes, or old friends trash-talking about each other’s favorite teams, or friends collaborating on dating advice.” In this environment, people know one another and the sharing is a “source of delight and gossip and bonding and sometimes drama, but drama of the recognizably human form.”
As Facebook and other social media outlets emerged in the 20-aughts, this “chat group” dynamic faced fierce competition for our attention. In a chat group, Hayes reminisces, “if it’s someone trying to get your attention it’s a person you have an actual relationship with…” Today, the very idea of “friendship” has been put to the test.
As social media companies perfected the means of predicting what would best capture attention, groups of users were drawn into “friendship” with like-minded users establishing what has been described as echo chambers. We saw the damage this wrought during the 2010s and then, most dramatically, during the pandemic beginning in 2020. This transformation was brought about due to a massive glut of information during the Information Age (my caps).
Hayes argues that this Information Age has given way recently to the Attention Age (also my caps). The amount of information (misinformation and disinformation included) available during this revolution has become virtually infinite. In our capitalist society, something that is infinitely available and accessible has very little value. It is scarcity that marks value and, with so much information to choose from, the scarcest resource of all becomes human attention.
This is the profound revelation of social media: If information is abundant and attention scarce, it is attention upon which is placed the most value.
Traditional newspaper, radio, and TV advertising attempted to target their message to the largest number of potential customers. With the development of complex algorithms supported by artificial intelligence, modern social media companies have perfected the art of targeting each individual user’s attention. The result is that we are not really living in echo chambers so much as we are each living in our own virtual worlds created with the accumulated data bits of all the previous places to which we attended.
And the accumulation of this data has made a lot of people rich. Hayes warns that our attention “has never been more in demand, more contested, and more important than it is now.” One need not look far to see the result because “[e]very single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the [social media companies’] pursuit of attention.”
The resulting social isolation is having profound effects upon American society; a pathology most severely exhibited among our children. We should all be thankful for Chris Hayes and others who are ringing the alarm bells on this one. In this remarkable book, Hayes also offers up a few solutions; although some critics have scoffed at their simplicity.
Simplicity to me, though, is the exact answer for complexity; especially when complexity has gotten completely out of hand. For example, I revel in Hayes’ suggestion to turn off the phone and join a book club. And all you have to do is decide to do it.
For example, I decided to respond to my door bell and then see what those two polite young men were up to. I don’t recall if I turned down the TV, or put down my phone to answer the door. I’d like to think that I heard the bell and then put down the book I was reading. Either way, I was presented with several choices… just like all of us during most of the moments of our lives. Attention is tricky that way.
