Christopher Schroeder

Tag: digital culture

  • A Little Privacy Please

    My kids cannot understand what I’m sure they would consider my obsession with privacy.

    They technically didn’t grow up with cell phone, and got their first in middle school. Still, they’ve spent most of their lives with these devices, and the cultural changes created by these, and they insist upon the death of privacy.

    I often ask in response why they don’t post their iCloud passwords on social media, or even give these to me. They obviously don’t and won’t but also don’t consider such stances as pro-privacy choices.

    I still advocate for the use of Signal for example as our messaging app of choice and ask about the more than 700 trackers, and almost 1,900 ads, blocked by my VPN over nine hours. They mostly ignore me.

    I was reminded this week of these different expectations in of all places a public bathroom at a prestigious private research hospital.

    I noticed the person at an adjacent urinal using his cell phone. I overheard another in a stall having a conversation, which continued at the sink — the phone was wedged between his shoulder and his ear — and as he left.

    Such experiences are surprisingly commonplace, and have been so for some time. I actually was once debating whether to ask someone to stow his phone as I watched him drop it in the urinal he was using and then fish it from the brackish water.

    I can understand why some think privacy no longer exists. At the same time, I fear the intrusion of these devices into all areas of human experience, and the absence of informed debates about these intrusions throughout everyday lives.

    We need to talk more about the recent Apple iCloud encryption changes for UK users or Amazon Alexa changes for everyone who uses its Echo devices. Otherwise, we are relinquishing freedoms and rights that we might wish one day, and perhaps in the not too distant future, we still had.

    Perhaps we can start with what should be obvious, and thus easy, agreements, such as cell phone in public bathrooms.

  • 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.

  • Information and Attention

    “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

    –Herbert A. Simon (1971)