SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We are at war, according to two researchers.
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SIMON: Oh. Sorry. Wait. Hold on. Yeah. Are - yeah. Wait. Hi. Can I call you back?
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SIMON: We are at war for...
RYAN: Scott...
SIMON: Yeah.
RYAN: ...Did you get the screener that I sent? Sorry to interrupt.
SIMON: Yeah. Yeah. Let me go check as soon as... ...
RYAN: OK.
SIMON: ...I'm done, OK?
RYAN: Just, you know, to make sure that you get it.
SIMON: Yeah. No. I'll check. I'll - yeah. I'll check. Thank you.
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SIMON: I'm not sure. What was I saying again?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Laughter).
SIMON: Oh, I - yeah. Oh, I - my daughter just sent me the cutest cat video. Aww. It's adorable. So as I was saying, we are at war, according to two researchers, for our attention span. Matt Klein is one of the researchers. He's a writer and founder of ZINE, a research think tank. He says the research on this war began with asking 150 so-called cultural researchers what they think the defining word of our time is.
MATT KLEIN: And overwhelmingly, the No. 1 word was overwhelmed. And I think at the crux of this dilemma is attention because if we cannot control attention, we cannot control anything else. Attention is upstream of reality. And I think today we're in this environment where every piece of media, online expression, institutional message, advertisement and piece of entertainment is fighting for our attention. Without diligence, we experience some pretty real psychic damage. I mean, it's not just the podcast and everyone's Substack newsletter that they and their mother have, but it's a text message. It's what's on news. It is everything.
SIMON: And the power of our human mind is finite, isn't it?
KLEIN: Very finite. We forget about our own humility. We're just little brains. And what's so problematic is that we compare ourselves, and we compete with machines and AI. So not only do we attempt to consume every piece of information and attempt to respond to it accordingly, but we're also trying to output a whole lot of content as well. There's this old myth as old as time, and the lesson is always the same. When we try to walk down this path of the infinite, we go mad because our minds are finite. There's only so much capacity that we have to make sense of everything that's happening, and we forget this lesson. And right now, when we hook ourselves up to all of our machines and all of our wearables and all of our betting markets, we forget the fact that we can't consume and metabolize all of this. We're not getting that message.
SIMON: What happens when we try and force ourselves to do that?
KLEIN: We're experiencing it right now. Look around. I mean, we experience mental health crises. We cannot make sense of what is real, what is not real. We get into comment debates. We enter fights with our loved ones and colleagues. We cannot really make sense of all of it. And when we're rudderless and when we're kind of drowning in this tsunami of information, we lose a peace of mind.
SIMON: It's common to blame iPhones and social media platforms, but you contend this began way before that.
KLEIN: Began a long time ago. A long, long time ago. And I think one point is probably in the '80s, when a certain news network decided it was no longer going to have a nightly sign-off. And all of a sudden, news stopped syncing with the rhythms of our sleep cycle, and instead, breaking news was 24/7. And every moment since, we've had more and more news and more and more reactions to the news. And I think when we consider that now, with everyone with a smartphone and an internet connection, they're essentially their own news broadcaster. And as a result, we're no longer getting news from institutions or legacy channels, but from each and every one of us. And further, the compounding fact is that our news is often now a reaction to the news, so there's this recursive loop. There's a comment about a comment about a comment. It's endless because there's so much space for news to spread.
SIMON: There are people who advocate pulling the plug. I do want to ask you how you feel about that, but also want to underscore the fact that, you know, this is the world in which we live. I mean, the text message that I miss could be something important from a loved one.
KLEIN: Absolutely, and I think that's the crux of our problem right now. That's the hard part. I think it's a privilege at times to be able to unplug, to have the dumb phone, to leave it at home, to completely disconnect on vacation. We're building a society upon these technologies - banking, education, our health. It's very hard to pull the plug entirely, which brings us back to this dilemma that we're in, which is, how do we navigate an environment with so much information and so many players attempting to hijack our attention, with the fact that there's really not a fair alternative? So I don't have an answer, and I'm not going to pretend there is an answer. But I do think step 1 is at least naming the dilemma and becoming increasingly mindful of it.
SIMON: Matt Klein, writer and founder of the research think tank ZINE. Thank you so much for being with us.
KLEIN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARC DE SOLEIL'S "THE THIEF IN MARRAKESH") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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