Journalist Chris Hayes explains why attention and experience which are essential components of being human are under threat. The speed, scale and scope of technological innovation in that past two or three decades mean that the quality of our daily life is being altered – and not for the better, as we are all caught up in it. The utopian early days of internet has given way to fear and loathing, and yet we cannot tear ourselves away from our screens. Even people who work in Silicon Valley insist that their children real actual books and play board games with strict screen time.

Technology encourages an “absent presence”, and the picture posted on social media, of our meal or travel that counts, not our experience of food or the place. We find it hard to read people’s faces and body language when we communicate screen to screen. Even the turn from handwriting to typing means that we are losing vital connections between brain and body that help us learn.

We all feel it, the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant all on their phones, or children on their mobiles at dinner table, and then we feel the buzz in out pockets. The boundary between private and public has been clear, at least in theory. Now, Chris Hayes writes, “ With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade. We are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labour in the nineteenth century: attention has become commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.  The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance”.

Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. Hayes writes, “ Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human”. Technology is having extreme adverse effect on our ability to focus, with critical implications for civic and mental health. 

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes, Penguin Press $32/ Scribe £20, 336 pages.