Christopher Schroeder

Category: community and culture

  • Seductive Sirens

    I wanted to like Chris Hayes’s (2025) new book. Instead, I found myself wanting more from it.

    Hayes compares the commodification of labor in the nineteenth century to the commodification of attention today. In doing so, he distinguishes among voluntary, involuntary, and social attention (27ff) and contrasts boredom and idleness (59ff) before considering the deep human desire for social attention as a remedy for loneliness, which he differentiates from solitude (81ff).

    Hayes compares the commodification of labor in the nineteenth century to the commodification of attention today. In doing so, he distinguishes among voluntary, involuntary, and social attention (27ff) and contrasts boredom and idleness (59ff) before considering the deep human desire for social attention as a remedy for loneliness, which he differentiates from solitude (81ff).

    Then he describes the attention age alienation as the unwitting extraction of human inner life, which has been transformed into a commodity (132ff). From there, he explains that information has become almost infinite while attention is finite (155ff), and that on a public scale leads to some of the worst aspects of digital life, such as trolling and conspiracies (195ff).

    As a remedy, he invokes commitment mechanisms, such as the wax and ties that enable Odysseus and his crew to sail safely past the sirens. Such remedies could be vinyl records for some or print newspapers, Reddit, or group chats for others (251ff).

    This analysis is useful as far as it goes. The historical context is invaluable, and the commodification analogy could prove to be productive despite the obvious differences between labor and attention. Both features and others increase our understanding of these issues, and the possibilities of productive responses.

    At the same time, this book relies too much on personal experience, which doesn’t necessarily invalidate any insights but does leave these underdeveloped and as a result underwhelming. It also seems in its relatively fragmented form a product of the very attention economy that he is critiquing, and that represents a discomforting lack of awareness that could challenge its credibility.

    Another draft or two could have increased the depth and synthesis of his analysis as well as enabled more developed, and useful, application. For example, it would benefit from demonstrating how his model can account for what is happening to both individual users and social spaces.

    It also needs to offer more than some strategies he has been trying. I too for example have found print to be useful, and have incorporated more of it into my daily routines. At the same time, I expect more for my efforts, especially when such involve book-length projects.

    Regardless, I think this book will be successful if it at least enables additional conversations about what these digital devices are doing to our communities and ourselves. Even if half-baked, it could be satisfying enough to make at least some reach for more.

  • Hands Off!

    Hands Off 2025

  • No More Author Events Please

    Local author Renée Rosen discussed her most recent book Let’s Call Her Barbie in a conversation with another local author Shelby Van Pelt at the Harold Washington Library Center last week.

    Rosen was personable, and shared interesting information that would appeal to anyone who read her book. Van Pelt was well-prepared with a list of open-ended questions that encouraged elaboration and allowed for responses.

    I just couldn’t understand why I was there, and left before the Q&A could start.

    I should have expected from the event description that the “conversation” would center upon Rosen’s new book. I just don’t know why these conversations appeal to anyone, and why the library would continue to sponsor these.

    These events reflect a cult of celebrity that fetishizes authors and writing as ends rather than means. As such, book tours are marketing campaigns — come for the celebrity, leave with a purchase — that seem more concerned with increasing sales than promoting ideas.

    Contemporary society is already too saturated with advertising for me to donate an hour to endure even more, especially when I leave with little more than I could have gotten from consuming the content on my own.

    I realize that I’m the minority on author events. I actually overheard someone praise this specific event at one of my book clubs this past weekend.

    I certainly am not advocating for the decontextualization of ideas, and believe in the need for historical and conceptual contexts. I’m just less interested in authors, and seen enough to know that production processes are idiosyncratic.

    I am also sympathetic to the forces felt by my librarian friends, who might have mixed motivations, and have to make compromises for the greater good, including the relevance of libraries. I just wonder whether they might be limiting efforts to reimagine libraries in contemporary democratic societies.

    A better event would be one that asked Rosen to use her research and experience for something more than the book she already wrote. For example, she could have been asked to elaborate on the effects of Barbie upon the cultural zeitgeist or to consider the ways that toys reflect the politics of their creators.

    Anything that involved an argument, or offered a position or a perspective that couldn’t have been obtained from her book, would have been worth the forty-five minutes I sat in the sparse audience on that cold February night.