Henry Farrell over at his substack, Programmable Mutter:
When Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes talked recently about Chris’s new book, The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, my friend John Sides took polite exception. His criticism doesn’t seem to be available online (it was in the newsletter for Good Authority) but his broad claim was that we should not pay too much attention to attention. Even if Trump and other Republicans are good at getting eyeballs, they may not win enough votes, and might even alienate people. Attracting attention may end up being a bad idea.
Good Authority is a political science publication* and John was making a case for the established wisdoms of political science. It was a good case, and one which, I am pretty sure that Chris would largely agree with (he says some pretty similar things in the book). But in the interests of good argument, I’d like to keep the dialectic going, counter-claiming that standard political science could greatly benefit from engaging with the ideas that Chris and Ezra batted around in their conversation, and that are discussed in greater depth in Chris’s book. Both podcast and book highlight problems that political scientists are bad at understanding. When political scientists think about attention, they usually rely on survey analysis and similar static means of capturing what citizens say about their attitudes. They do not, with occasional exceptions think much about the flows involved in therelationship between attention, technology and bandwidth.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.