Zeni Perez’s Reviews > The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource > Status Update

Conspiracies, trolling, and “what about this” grow with the attention economy

I really need more people to lock in on watching longer forms of media with nuance & depth in real time.

There’s no community on the internet, just people and their collective attention reserves. People that spam have no shame. Our attention is getting spread thin everyday. Watching multiple screens at once, retaining half of it.

Some people trade attention for money. Others vice versa. At best people trade attention to turn one material into another, hopefully for good.

If you’re conditioned for info poverty, you don’t realize how precious attention is now

Attention as currency makes us more isolated and alienated as our algorithms customize for us, our only connections to each other now are when we share it together. It’s used to be TV watching together, now it’s TikTok

I couldn’t be famous. Have to view yourself by strangers is too much

Social attention is being the object of someone’s attention or someone paying attention to you. Without it, we go insane, we can’t do solitude. The possibility of reciprocating it is the basis of all social relationships but not enough to sustain all of them.

Maybe boredom is a modern invention. Before technology advances, we were always social because it meant survival. Newborns are dependent on attention to live. Meditation is less common as we need a constant distraction it’s harder to choose to sit still with our thoughts.

The more leisure time you have the more boredom too

We already know social media apps sell our data to ads to try to sell to us personally. What else is new