Toby's Commentary
How do we decide what to do with our attention, and is it even our decision? In our limited time on this earth, our attention determines what we make of ourselves and–in a direct way–all that we consciously experience.
Why is it so easy to get distracted? And if distraction pulls us away from what matters–paying attention to our family, contemplating our existence, doing meaningful work–then why does it seem like our society goes out of its way to cultivate distractions? Billboards in every public space. News written to attract, not inform. Apps that train us to “check in” compulsively.
This book provides a history of people and institutions who learned to monetize or exploit human attention. The story starts in the mid-1800s with daily newspapers (what we’d now call tabloids) and those vibrant Parisian poster ads (precursors to the vibrant visual ads that now surround us). Things spiral out of control from there.
Any given ad market will saturate–people only have so many hours to read newspapers or watch TV–so ad merchants will compete to gain people’s attention. To win attention, you need to make content that distracts from the other guy’s content, and to do this you need to make your content more sexy, more outrageous, more flashy. This results in a “race to the bottom”.
The author claims that these races are punctuated by revolts from the populace–people saying enough is enough. His examples include the creation of the FCC, the 60s counterculture, internet ad blockers, and HBO/Netflix’s “golden age of TV”.
I’m skeptical of this thesis. A case study covered in the book is Timothy Leary’s call to “turn on, tune in, drop out”–to reject the mainstream’s attentional habits and to find your inner self. Yet this slogan came out of playing the advertising game (riffing on Pepsi jingles) and the soda industry would later reclaim its slogan (“Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola rut”). The counterculture’s symbols of peace, love, and individuality were also co-opted (“I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a Coke…”, “Think different”). The counterculture reinvented capitalism but not in the way it intended: its effect was to eliminate the homogeneity of mass market products but in its place came our segmentation into subcultures. We express our allegiance to subcultures, our “individuality”, by buying into certain products.
I find the results of subsequent revolts against advertising similarly hollow. The “golden age of TV” may have replaced ads with subscription fees, but the shows still have “filler” and Netflix still autoplays the next episode. TV is still afraid to let us control our own attention.
I appreciated this book’s broad coverage of the history of advertising and propaganda, but I wish its analysis went deeper.
The author mentions different qualities of attention, “transitory” versus “sustained” attention, that rapid visual stimulus can engross people with Attention Deficit Disorder. The implications are not explored.
How does the market’s obsession with attention affect our own personal needs for attention? There is a chapter on Instagram and the recent phenomenon of “advertising” one’s own life–presenting an idealized version for public consumption and in some cases monetizing this persona. Although the facts are covered, the author does not delve into the psychological ramifications of this way of life.
The book opens with the troubling trend of public schools selling ads in order to meet their budgets. Putting ads on large displays in hallways, on lockers, on report cards. This topic is never substantially revisited.
In the epilogue, the author encourages us to reclaim our attention by taking “digital Sabbaths” and designating certain places as sanctuaries from ads. This is surely a good idea but seems insufficient for addressing the systemic draining of our attention that is so entangled in our culture and economy.
A worthwhile insight developed in this book is the lineage from religion to advertising. The church had the earliest attention monopoly. Many of the early successful ad men were former preachers. Our celebrity “worship” is similar to the earlier worship of Pagan gods who, like our celebrities, were known for their “fits of anger and vindictiveness, petty jealousies, and embarrassing bouts of drunkenness.” If we have psychological needs that have traditionally been fulfilled by religions, and advertising now exploits those needs, is there some other way we can address those needs in a healthier, more conscious way?
December 27, 2016