Book Review: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2025). Chris Hayes.

I heard on the news last night that this brand new book by the popular MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes has zoomed to the #1 position on the New York Times bestseller list, only a couple of weeks after its release. Having now read it, and given the political trends of the past few years, and the chaos flowing out from the new administration since January 20^th, it’s not hard to understand why.

The topic of attention, and the adverse effects that our modern communications and social media technologies have on us as individuals, as well as on our political and social systems, has been much discussed and analyzed recently, in magazine articles, books and on TV. Given all that “attention on attention”, it might be tempting to assume Hayes’ book is just more noise on a by-now tired subject. But it is no such thing. Instead, it is a deeply thoughtful and well-researched volume, written in a clear, honest and accessible style, which is a pleasure to read.

 

Hayes makes clear from the outset that he is bringing two very different sets of eyes and perspectives to his analysis. On the one hand, he is one of us, a person of our time and place, who constantly uses and is frequently disturbed by his own use of social media on his smartphone, and the troubling effects it has on his own mind, his ability to focus and his relationships with family and friends.

 

On the other hand, in his professional role as a cable news host, his success is completely dependent on his ability to understand and use the tools of manipulating and commanding the attention of his viewers, to keep them watching, and his advertisers happy. So he is able to bring both his personal, subjective feelings and his informed, rational understanding of attention in our current media environment to explore many important aspects of attention, and to explain why and how the ability to control attention has become the most important currency of power and control in our society.

 

In the process of his wide-ranging exploration of this vital topic for understanding what is happening right now in our society, our lives and our politics, he writes beautifully and with real insight about many aspects of attention.

 

He begins with an explanation of the book’s title, which is a reference to the scene in the Odyssey, where Circe warns Odysseus to plug the ears of his ship’s crew, and tie himself to the mast, to avoid being lured to death by the Sirens. He continues to revisit that analogy throughout the book, which he uses to portray the constant conflict between our desire to be stimulated by interesting things in our environment, and our need to filter out and block distractions.

 

From there, he’s off on a fascinating trip through many aspects of attention. He talks about “moral panics”, and many of the past instances through history where new technologies were greeted first with delight and amazement, then with fear, because of their perceived harms to existing modes of attention, focus and memory. He compares and contrasts those “moral panics” to the present moment, and the phenomenon of social media on smartphones.

 

Hayes moves on to discuss the purpose of attention in the human and animal worlds, and the forms it takes, including voluntary (when one deliberately focuses), involuntary (when we respond to startling noises or threats in our environment) and social (the conscious and unconscious attention we pay to others, and what they are saying and doing). He does a nice job of surveying some of the earlier theories of psychology and philosophy relating to attention and our human lives, and the strengths, weaknesses and relevance of various ideas from the past.

 

One area I found particularly intriguing was his discussion of fame and celebrity, and how it affects and disrupts social attention for both the famous person, and the people observing and interacting with that famous person. It’s unusual to get such a perceptive, self-aware and relatively modest account of the subjective personal experience of celebrity from someone who is himself quite famous. I appreciated the fact that he recognizes the conflicting responses he and other famous people have to being “important” and instantly recognizable, and could reflect thoughtfully upon both the positive and negative aspects of it.  

 

Inevitably, his narrative leads him to draw conclusions about how social media and our current information and media markets have essentially turned our attention into a commodity, like labor in the Industrial Age, that has been expropriated from us by monopoly capitalism. He then turns to the problem of Donald Trump, and how his mastery of the ability to constantly bring attention back to himself, even if it’s negative attention, has led him to his current domination of the American political scene.

 

This is one of those books that is too sweeping to be fully summarized in a review. But it is well worth reading, both for the pleasure of following Hayes’ ideas and insights, and for the assistance it provides us in thinking about our own lives, and how we might begin to reassert control over the devices and social media apps that have so powerfully captured our own attention. Highly recommended.