DIGITAL OVERLOAD—TWO BOOKS (HOW QUAINT BUT EFFECTIVE)

JENNIFER SZALAI’S “How Big Tech Mined Our Attention and Broke Our Politics” appeared in The New York Times Book Review (alas, perhaps behind a paywall). Yet it contains tidbits well worth the gleaning. 

The Books Reviewed: Jennifer Szalai writes, “Superbloom, by Nicholas Carr, and The Siren’s Call, by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, argue that we are ill equipped to handle the infinite scroll of the information age.” 

SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, by Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton & Company, 2025. 

THE SIRENS’ CALL: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes, Penguin Press, 2025.

IT Alarm. “Carr,” she notes, “has been sounding the alarm over new information technology for years, most famously in ‘The Shallows’ (2010), in which he warned about what the internet was doing to our brains. Superbloom is an extension of his jeremiad into the social media era.”

She continues, “Carr’s new book happens to be published the same day as The Sirens’ Call, by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, which traces how big tech has made enormous profits and transformed our politics by harvesting our attention.”

Detrimental Scrolling. “Both authors,” Szalai says, “argue that something fundamental to us, as humans, is being exploited for inhuman ends. We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment.”

Digital Junk Food. Szalai recounts that Carr “lays some of the blame with tech companies, which ply us with the digital equivalent of junk food. They engineer how we relate to one another online by selecting for content that whips up strong emotions to draw us ‘deeper into the feed.’ ”

Overall, Szalai notes, “Instead of the curation imposed by ‘the public-interest standard’ and ‘the fairness doctrine,’ a deteriorating media ecosystem selects for clicks.”

Our Vanity and Cruelness. “But,” she adds, “Carr also suggests that regulation can only do so much: Blaming the technology industry lets us off the hook. This is a book that gestures repeatedly to a tragic, if nebulous, concept of ‘human nature.’ More communication does not necessarily lead to more understanding. The title refers to a rare “super bloom” of California poppies in typically arid soil, an episode that drew selfie-taking influencers, flower-trampling crowds and a frenzied backlash. Left to our own devices, so to speak, we can get vain, careless, resentful and cruel.”

Reflectiveness Versus Gut Reaction. “Our antisocial proclivities,” Szalai says, “were once kept in check by more effortful methods of reaching out to one another. ‘The deliberate, reflective practice’ of composing a handwritten letter, Carr laments, has been superseded by the ‘short, snappy’ idiom of texting. By removing barriers to communication, social media has enabled us to let loose our worst instincts and transmit to a huge audience whatever thoughtlet comes to mind.” 

Image by Igor Bastidas in The New York Times. 

Politics Suffers As Well. Szalai recounts, “What Hayes offers in The Sirens’ Call is an ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.”

She quotes Hayes on social media entrepreneurs: “They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention and then repeat those.”

Bottomless Psychological Needs. Szalai continues, “It turns out that a reliable way of grabbing people’s attention is to ping that deep need inside all of us, carried over from our helpless dependency on our caregivers in childhood: Someone is paying attention to me! We typically crave positive forms of attention and shrink back from negative ones—except for people like Trump, whose ‘psychological needs’ are ‘so bottomless,’ Hayes says, ‘that he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get.’ Trump has intuited that we live at a time when fortune favors the brazen: ‘He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him.’ ”

Proposed Defenses. Szalai recounts, “Instead of submitting to the endless scroll, Hayes now makes a point of sitting down with a print version of the newspaper. Carr, for his part, extols a ‘more material and less virtual existence.’ I think they’re both right, even if trying to change one’s own behavior feels small next to the structural forces delineated in their books. But for now, yes—it’s going to take willful acts of sensory deprivation for us to come to our senses.”

Hmm… If it were to help make for a more sensible populace, I’d gladly drop the political aspects of this SimanaitisSays retirement hobby. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025