Book Review: THE SIREN'S CALL by Chris Hayes

THE SIREN’S CALL: HOW ATTENTION BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST ENDANGERED RESOURCE by Chris Hayes (Penguin Press, January 28, 2025) Hardcover, 336 pages. ISBN: 9780593653111

     A quick summary of THE SIREN'S CALL (a very appropriate title, and an excellent analogy): a thoughtful analysis of how today's society bombards us with calls for our attention, and our increasing reliance on smartphone notifications and distractions. It's changed a lot in our daily lives, and Hayes does a good job of explaining how we got to now - with historical references and comparisons. 

     This is an important book (but not perfect) and I would recommend reading this as well as THE ANXIOUS GENERATION by Jonathan Haidt to anyone with young children, teenage children, or grandchildren. Forearmed is forewarned, although there doesn't appear to be a clear and practical solution - short of banning these influencers (not likely to happen).

Hayes is nothing but thorough, exceedingly so and sometimes to the point of overwhelming with information and support for his points. The entire time I was reading this book I kept wondering if he wouldn't be able to accomplish the same purpose with a long (but much shorter) thought piece/essay/commentary in The Atlantic or The New Republic magazines. 

He does conclude by suggesting only a few solutions, but he then admits that they just aren't likely to occur. So the only take-away from all this is to just be aware of how we can be manipulated by demands for our attention. I cancelled my Twitter/X, Instagram and other social media accounts some time ago, with only Facebook remaining (but considering deleting that account as well). And, I will continue to get my news from several television networks (ones that I feel are reliable and not manipulative) as well as two daily newspapers (digital subscriptions). THREE STARS.

"The danger of too much information happens to be precisely the endemic problem of the information age . . . Everyone labors under the strain of information being cheap and plentiful and overwhelming." p. 162

"While relatively early in identifying this phenomenon, Future Shock lays out what are now a set of commonly held convictions about the growing abundance and accessibility of information: there's too much of it, we're constantly overwhelmed and distracted, it's driving us all a bit mad." p. 163

"It's in the context of the growing demands of a world with boundless information that people began thinking quite seriously about our capacity to process the information. Which brings us back to the power of attention.

In that now famous 1971 lecture,"Designing Organizations For An Information-Rich World", referenced in Chapter 2 - Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon argued that attention was the key to understanding the information age. His most quoted passage contains his core insight:

'In an information-rich world, 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. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.' p. 164