Have you ever wondered why you feel constantly pulled in different directions, unable to focus deeply on what truly matters? The culprit is likely the attention economy—a system that treats your time and focus as commodities to be bought, sold, and competed for at every turn.
In our hyperconnected world, this economic model has fundamentally reshaped how we work, consume media, engage in politics, and relate to one another. Author Jenny Odell explores these dynamics in How to Do Nothing, while MSNBC host Chris Hayes examines the media landscape in The Sirens’ Call, revealing how the monetization of attention has fragmented public discourse and left us struggling to think deeply about complex issues.
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What Is the Attention Economy?
In her book How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell discusses the consequences of the attention economy. What is the attention economy? It’s the mindset of placing a monetary value on time and attention. Odell explains how the attention economy works and explores its negative impacts.
(Shortform note: The concept of the attention economy was first proposed by 20th-century American psychologist and economist Herbert A. Simon and amounted to a shift in how to understand information. Simon suggested that instead of thinking of information—advertising, media, ideas, and so on—as a scarce commodity sought out by consumers, we should instead think of the attention of consumers as a scarce commodity sought out by information (or the people who create it).)
How the Attention Economy Works
Odell explains that, in the 1980s, corporate deregulation—the elimination of laws and rules regarding corporate conduct—as well as the loss of labor power, allowed the wealthy and major corporations to monetize much larger portions of people’s lives. The cutting of social safety nets and stagnation of wages also put people in a situation where they couldn’t say no to more work or worse working conditions without risking their livelihoods. This economic shift led to a mindset shift: People had to start thinking of their time and attention in terms of monetary value.
(Shortform note: The development of the attention economy also correlates with a general trend in the developed world away from manufacturing and toward a knowledge- and service-based economy. In this new economy, a much larger portion of wealth comes not from concrete things like houses, cars, or oil but from intangible things like data or intellectual property. This is important because while tangible things are limited in supply, intangible things aren’t—for instance, unlike cars, computer files can be endlessly reproduced at little to no cost. But while supply is nearly limitless, demand is not. Therefore, success in this new economy requires getting attention to create demand.)
The Monetization of Time
The increased monetization of time, Odell explains, means people are almost always “on” in some way. Over the past several decades, the line between when people are and are not working has grown blurrier. More jobs are temporary gigs or rely on self-promotion, meaning people have to use their time not only to do work but also to ensure they have more work to do in the future.
(Shortform note: The increased monetization of time doesn’t necessarily mean people are getting paid more for all the time they’re “on.” In fact, with the rise of gig and remote work, unpaid overtime has risen sharply over the last few decades—time when workers are doing work-related tasks but not getting paid. This can mean constantly keeping an eye on their email inboxes, taking urgent after-hours work calls, or simply blurring the lines between when they’re on or off work.)
The Monetization of Attention
Odell suggests that the internet and social media have increasingly monetized attention. The internet generates more money than ever through pay-per-click ads, donations, sponsorships, and so on. And with the vast amount of information available on the internet, people have to compete to be noticed, and some use social or psychological manipulation to try and boost engagement. Even if you aren’t trying to garner attention of your own online, simply using the internet and social media means facing hordes of people clamoring for your attention, many of whom are manipulating you to try and boost engagement.
(Shortform note: Over the past decade or so, there’s been a shift in the monetization of attention as more online businesses move from pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on free content to subscription services, sponsored content, and content behind paywalls. This also means a change in strategy, as subscription services are less concerned with the views on each individual piece of content and more concerned with maintaining their existing customer base. But while this might lessen the constant demands for consumer attention, it won’t stop attention from being monetized—especially as more subscription services compete with one another.)
How the Attention Economy Is Reshaping Society
In his book The Sirens’ Call, MSNBC host Chris Hayes takes a closer look at how these changes have played out in the media we consume, the political dialogue we take part in, the social validation we pursue—and the resulting fragmentation of our public discourse.
1. Media Organizations Compete for Our Limited Attention
The transformation of attention into a commodity has altered how media organizations operate. Hayes explains, based on his experience at MSNBC, that the competition for attention degrades public discourse as news organizations abandon their traditional role of informing citizens in favor of capturing eyeballs. Every cable news show receives minute-by-minute ratings data that creates intense pressure on hosts and producers. Hayes describes how when a segment performs well, the rush of validation encourages more of the same content. When ratings drop, the fear of failure drives increasingly sensational programming choices.
(Shortform note: HBO’s The Newsroom illustrated the pressure to prioritize attention over truth—and its psychological toll—when the show’s fictional news team was forced to cover the Casey Anthony trial and the Anthony Weiner scandal for ratings, pushing aside more substantive stories. At times, the constant ratings pressure not only undercuts editorial judgment but also erodes journalism’s democratic function as the “fourth estate” that holds government and powerful institutions accountable. The episode’s climactic moment came when anchor Will McAvoy decided to “throw out the rundown”—abandoning the Casey Anthony coverage—and instead gave his economics correspondent two full segments to discuss the debt ceiling.)
Hayes explains that the competition for eyeballs has led to the adoption of slot machine mechanics across news and entertainment platforms. Television producers use rapid scene changes, flashing graphics, and urgent music to grab our involuntary attention. Breaking news alerts multiply, even for minor stories, because novelty captures focus more effectively than importance. Social media platforms employ infinite scroll designs that eliminate natural stopping points, keeping users engaged through the compulsive need to check for new content.
Media organizations have also learned to weaponize interruption and novelty as attention-capture strategies. Push notifications create artificial urgency around routine news updates, auto-playing videos assault users’ involuntary attention systems, and clickbait headlines promise information rewards that the actual content rarely delivers. The result is a media landscape where attention-grabbing ability matters more than truth, importance, or public benefit. Stories that generate strong emotional reactions—particularly outrage, fear, or tribal identification—receive disproportionate coverage. Meanwhile, complex issues, such as climate change or policy details, struggle to compete with more immediately stimulating content.
(Shortform note: News media specifically targets our emotions and exploits our brains’ threat-detection systems by casting political opponents as existential dangers. Networks with specific political slants build narratives around fear and envy, portraying opposing groups as threats to viewers’ way of life while offering their programming as safe havens from social conflict. The emotional triggers these networks use—fear, anger, tribal identification—override rational thinking and create the same dopamine spikes and elevated stress hormones found in many forms of addiction.)
| The Slot Machine Model Exploits the Brain’s Reward Prediction System Hayes’s comparison between digital media and slot machines isn’t just metaphorical—it reflects how both social media and news media hijack the same neural mechanisms that get people hooked on gambling. Research in neuroscience reveals that our brains are “prediction machines” that constantly try to anticipate rewards and minimize uncertainty. When we encounter unpredictable rewards—like a slot machine payout, a viral social media post, or a breaking news alert—our brains release dopamine not when we actually receive the reward, but in anticipation of it, which keeps us constantly checking our phones for more. This creates a powerful addiction cycle because intermittent, unpredictable rewards are more compelling than consistent ones. As behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered, animals will work harder for random rewards than guaranteed ones. Social media platforms deliberately exploit this by using “pull-to-refresh” mechanisms that mirror slot machine levers. Similarly, news outlets use breaking news alerts, rapid scene changes, and urgent graphics to trigger the same psychological mechanisms. |
2. Politicians Adapt Their Communication to Maximize Attention
Political communication has been restructured around the mechanics of attention capture, and Hayes identifies Donald Trump as the exemplar of this transformation. Trump’s communication strategy exploits the fundamental asymmetry between attention-grabbing and attention-holding. Grabbing attention is relatively easy: Any loud, shocking, or novel statement can briefly capture focus. Holding attention requires sustained engagement with complex ideas, which is much more difficult in a fragmented media environment. Trump has mastered the art of generating a constant stream of attention-grabbing moments without ever needing to hold an audience’s focus long enough to scrutinize his statements in detail.
Hayes argues that Trump’s success with this approach has normalized attention-seeking behavior across the political spectrum. He contends that politicians now compete to generate viral moments, memorable soundbites, and social media engagement rather than substantive policy proposals because attention has become the currency of political power. Politicians who capture more public attention receive more media coverage, attract more campaign donations, and gain more influence over public discourse. In the attention economy, successful political communication prioritizes simplicity, emotional intensity, and tribal identification over nuance, evidence, or deliberation because they’re more effective at commanding focus.
| Trump as Both Architect and Product of the Attention Economy Research suggests Trump may be as much a product of existing social dynamics and cultural tensions as he is their architect. Experimental research reveals that Trump’s success partly resulted from a backlash against restrictive communication norms: When researchers primed people to think about political correctness, participants showed significantly increased support for Trump because he said things they felt they couldn’t say. While Hayes sees Trump as an attention-first politician who has normalized such behavior, this suggests Trump’s appeal stemmed from pre-existing cultural tensions rather than entirely new political dynamics. Political communication experts confirm that Trump consciously controls the news media by instigating controversy to get coverage and change the subject as he wants. But they note this communication style was enabled by media changes that predated his presidency, including decades of deregulation that shifted news toward entertainment and profit-driven models. Yet Trump has transformed the Republican party: Some argue that it now stands less for traditional conservative principles than for what Trump wants, and its official platform has shifted from policy language to crisis-focused rhetoric designed for social media engagement. |
The Lincoln-Douglas debates serve as Hayes’s counter-example to illustrate how political discourse has degraded. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas held three-hour public debates featuring complex, layered arguments about slavery that required sustained focus from audiences numbering in the thousands. Their speeches assumed that citizens had the ability to follow extended arguments and weigh competing evidence.
By contrast, modern political debates are designed around attention scarcity. Questions jump from topic to topic, candidates receive two-minute response windows, and success is measured by memorable moments rather than substance. The format assumes that audiences don’t have the focus for serious deliberation.
| Nostalgia for a Previous Era—or for a Comprehensible World? Hayes acknowledges that his discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates builds on media theorist Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), which he holds up as the pinnacle of attention criticism. Postman used the Lincoln-Douglas debates to argue that TV had degraded political communication. Before Postman, critics worried that radio, newspapers, and novels would ruin serious discourse, suggesting that each generation romanticizes previous eras and views change as catastrophic. But Postman identifies a deeper reason why the debates feel so remote today. Medieval society, he argues, had a coherent belief system centered on shared principles (like religious doctrine) that made the world comprehensible. But with the arrival of the printing press, information proliferated and became disconnected from its purpose of solving meaningful problems. (It became a commodity and a source of entertainment, rather than something that helps us understand our place in the world.) Postman argues the result is that we now live in an “incomprehensible” world where “nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise” since we no longer have shared frameworks for deciding what information matters or how it fits together. In this context, the idea of sustained public deliberation about weighty questions may seem foreign—not because our attention spans have declined, but because we no longer share the common intellectual foundations that would make such debates meaningful. |
3. People Strive to Gain Others’ Attention
The attention economy also compels ordinary people to compete for attention from strangers. Social media gives everyone access to immediate feedback through likes, shares, comments, and views. Hayes explains that as we monitor our success at generating attention and become addicted to external validation, we adjust what we post: Because provocative content generates more engagement, we adopt increasingly extreme positions or share more personal information to keep our audience’s interest. Since conflict and controversy capture more attention than cooperation, we pick fights rather than seeking understanding.
(Shortform note: Our quest for attention drives us to create provocative content because platforms reward moral-emotional language—encouraging us to exaggerate our expressions to keep others engaged. This happens because using conflict-oriented language allows us to signal our belonging to our social groups. But while these posts strengthen bonds with like-minded people, they also make us appear less worthy of conversation to those who disagree with us.The problem is amplified because social media algorithms mistake engagement for preference. Since our brains evolved to focus on potential threats, we naturally pay attention to negative content, so algorithms end up promoting outrage and division.)
Hayes also contends that the attention economy exploits our fundamental need for social recognition. We become trapped into constantly seeking approval from strangers who give us likes and follows, but not genuine human connection. We become separated from our authentic selves because we learn to perform versions of our identity optimized for attention capture rather than personal fulfillment or genuine connection, leaving us feeling psychologically fragmented and unsatisfied.
(Shortform note: Researchers confirm that social media changes how we behave, online and off, by rewarding us for performing fake versions of ourselves instead of being who we really are. Our brains have expectations about what social feedback we should receive, so when we get likes and comments for our posts but don’t get the same validation in real life, we interpret this mismatch to mean that our real selves are somehow wrong or inadequate. To get the validation we’ve learned to expect, we adopt more provocative positions, share more information, or try to look more like our filtered photos. Social media trains us to optimize our image for attention, warping our sense of self-worth when the real “us” doesn’t measure up.)
4. Loss of Context and Depth
In addition to the repercussions that Hayes lays out, Odell believes there are two main consequences of the attention economy: loss of context and depth, and social atomization.
Odell explains there’s no room for context and depth in the attention economy. Learning about the intentions and complexities behind an action, statement, or viewpoint requires a lot of time and probably won’t get very much attention. On the other hand, broader, shallower, and context-free actions, statements, and viewpoints take little time to produce and get a lot more attention. For example, people tend to present generalized versions of themselves on social media, or they use “clickbait” designed to generate outrage—both of which forgo a nuanced perspective in favor of something more marketable.
Without context and depth, people are more easily misled and manipulated. They lack a full understanding of a given situation, and so they’re more likely to go with the most obvious or most popular interpretation, whether or not it’s actually true. For example, Shirley Sherrod, a US Department of Agriculture official in the Obama administration, was asked to resign when a portion of a speech she gave decades earlier was posted online without context to make it seem like she was biased against white people.
(Shortform note: Many authors and academics have noted a shift in society away from context and depth, though they disagree on what’s causing this change. While Odell points to technological and economic changes, others suggest it’s because poor education leaves people without the skills to think deeply or because of a general lack of technological and media literacy.)
5. Social Atomization
The attention economy also leads to social atomization, or people becoming disconnected from one another and their communities, explains Odell. Since people are “always on,” they have less time to devote to nurturing connections with the people around them. In addition, succeeding in the attention economy requires people to constantly advocate for or “market” themselves through things like self-promotion or networking. This leads them to see each other as customers, or potential sources of monetary value, rather than as friends and community members.
Atomization has contributed in large part to the modern era’s epidemic of loneliness and lack of meaning in life, explains Odell. It also hampers social and political activism—when people lack deep connections with one another, it’s more difficult to organize them in pursuit of a specific goal.
The Result: Fragmented Public Discourse
The cumulative effect of these changes has been the fragmentation of public discourse. Hayes argues that shared attention has become nearly impossible to achieve. Where previous generations watched the same three television networks or read the same newspaper, algorithmic personalization has created individualized information bubbles. With our collective attention divided among countless competing sources and platforms (and our individual attention spans shortened through constant exposure to rapid content switching), our collective focus shifts constantly between crisis and distraction.
The result is a public discourse that prioritizes the urgent over the important, the simple over the complex, and the emotionally satisfying over the factually accurate. Complex problems that require sustained public engagement, like climate change, suffer most from this fragmentation. Unlike a viral video or political scandal, climate change lacks the immediate sensory triggers that capture involuntary attention in our current media environment. Hayes argues that this represents not merely a communication problem, but a crisis of democratic governance: Democratic institutions designed for deliberative decision-making cannot function effectively when citizens lack the attentional resources necessary for informed participation.
(Shortform note: The movement for marriage equality from 2003 to 2015 challenges Hayes’s claim that fragmented attention always prevents democratic progress on complex issues. Activists used viral social media campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and corporate support to make opposition seem “uncool.” The fragmented landscape enabled success: Different messages could reach targeted audiences while viral moments created shared experiences across political divides. Public support for marriage equality shifted from 27% in 1996 to 60% by 2015, suggesting that complex social issues can achieve rapid progress when movements adapt to work with, rather than against, contemporary attention dynamics.)
| Photography as a Mirror of Attention Fragmentation Experts say the role of photography in public discourse illustrates the causes and consequences of fragmented attention. Historically, photography promised to create shared cultural experiences and democratic dialogue—what scholars call a “museum without walls” where citizens can encounter diverse perspectives and form collective judgments about public issues. Protest movements have used photography to build solidarity, such as when images from Occupy Wall Street spread globally and inspired similar visual conventions in Hong Kong and Ferguson demonstrations. But this unifying potential has been undermined by the same algorithmic personalization Hayes describes. Different communities consume completely separate visual ecosystems. A documentary photographer found that images circulating among white working-class networks, Black suburban families, radical activists, and media professionals rarely overlapped, despite all groups using the same platforms. Moreover, the proliferation of photography itself contributes to the attention fragmentation Hayes describes—with billions of images uploaded daily, each photograph competes for increasingly brief moments of attention, training viewers to process visual information rapidly rather than to contemplate it deeply. The challenge is compounded by photography’s limitations in capturing complex, long-term problems like climate change. When California wildfires turned skies apocalyptic orange in 2020, smartphone cameras automatically “corrected” the unnatural colors to look more normal. This tendency for photographs to normalize the abnormal parallels how our attention economy leaves issues like climate change struggling to compete for sustained public focus. It also reveals a deeper contradiction in how attention fragmentation works: While social media algorithms reward extreme content, the constant stream of crises raises our baseline for what feels shocking. Researchers call this “apocalypse fatigue” or “compassion fatigue,” describing how repeated exposure to catastrophic information makes us emotionally desensitized rather than motivated to act. |
Learn More About the Attention Economy
To better understand the attention economy and its broader context, check out Shortform’s guides to the books we’ve referenced in this article:
