The Sirens' Call

Economist Herbert Simon, whose 1971 essay on the attention economy is one of the single most insightful meditations on attention ever published, observed long before the age of constant smartphone push notifications that a “wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.

What this also means is that the experience of boredom—when it appears, how important it is, whether it even exists—changes across time and the forms of human social and economic organization. Our age features a set of technologies and social conditions that work together to maximize our boredom if we are not constantly diverted from it.

How do you capture people’s attention? As someone who spends much of his working life attempting to answer this question, it’s helpful to break it into two parts. First you need to grab attention: you need people to tune in to your show, or stop flipping the channels when they see it on their screen, or load the video link when a clip passes by the