A friend of mine once told me that “You are where your attention is.” That line always stuck with me. It was a reminder that the most important choice we all make is also the most common one. It’s the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to.

One of the primary features of this age of the internet and smartphones and algorithmic feeds is that our attention is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because we’re endlessly pushed around by a parade of distractions. Your phone is ringing, your Apple Watch is blinking, you got a ping on Slack from a coworker, you’re getting an email notification as you’re sitting down for dinner… it’s always something.

This level of distraction is not an accident. Our devices have engineered the incessant need for stimulus and a whole industry has emerged that’s devoted to capturing our attention and then selling it to the highest bidder.

Chris Hayes is the host of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the author of a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. The discourse on attention is, shall we say, crowded, but Hayes makes an interesting — and novel — argument about how the rearranging of social and economic life around the pursuit of attention represents “a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism.”

I invited Hayes on The Gray Area to talk about what that actually means and why he thinks we haven’t fully appreciated the significance of this transformation. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

How do you define a word like attention? What are some of the more useful or practical ways to think about what it means in human life?

Chris Hayes

There’s a lot of debate about this. There are some people who say it’s not really even a coherent concept. And some of those critiques I take seriously. In some ways I’m using it in an everyday sense because I think it is naming something real.

So one way to think about attention is the flash beam of thought. That’s a common trope. There’s a William James description of attention that everyone who writes about attention quotes because it’s so good, which is: withdrawal from certain things to focus on others.

If you think about what a stagehand with the spotlight does in a Broadway play… I’m focusing on you right now. If I take a second, there’s a million forms of perceptual stimulus in my visual field right now. I could focus on those. I’m not. I’m focusing on you through an effort of conscious will. So that’s how we think about attention: the ability to willfully focus, basically.

But then there are other dimensions of that. So there’s conscious attention, voluntary attention, then there’s involuntary attention. Right now, if someone busted into my studio and opened that door, I couldn’t not look. It would literally be impossible. Before I had any conscious will over it, no matter how disciplined I am, pre-consciously a system would fire that would wrench my attention towards that door going open. So that’s involuntary........

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