The old proverb that used to serve as the killer put-down to those who like the sound of their voices to the detriment of the capacity to debate, reflect or, quelle surprise, listen to or examine the arguments of others. Be they the pub bore, the Hyde Park corner speaker, the football terrace analyst or demagogue.
In most everyday, mundane, micro social settings, that truism still holds good. However in the macro world of communications and politics, the empty vessels have risen to the political stratosphere. Nowhere has this been more apparent than the USA where re-elected President Donald Trump with his shock and awful messaging has been the prime beneficiary of the growing and global spread of the attention deficit economy and society. To get some understanding of how Trump and cognate demagogic figures have risen to power, it is essential to look at they have upended so successfully the traditional frameworks of communication and political deliberation.
The first step in winning any public debate, be it at high school or televised presidential or prime ministerial forums, or to persuade others of the veracity of one’s arguments (“winning friends and influencing people”) is to marshal the evidence for your case. Persuasion not the message itself is the key. Or so it used to be. Now gaining attention is the key in our hyper-communicative world where gaining clicks are the new means of attracting followers and of forming electoral constituencies. The main determinant of our modern communications landscape has of course been the Internet. The World Wide Web really did bring new voices into a national conversation far too long dominated by narrow white, male and affluent bandwidths. Unfortunately it did not return our democratic culture and types of thought and deliberation to a more serious and reflective era. The time honoured rules of communicative engagement have been jettisoned in favour of the meme culture – the amalgam of word and image that is the offspring of the short written statement and digital video output.[1]
Into the global cacophony of sound where everybody had to shout to be heard and where variants of same snippets of language, phrases and slogans were chewed over by globalised yet silo isolated participants in inchoate conversations, entered the emptiest vessel of all but the possessor of the greatest megaphone of all – Donald Trump. He understood the golden rule of this global space of noise – the people shouting the loudest still get the most attention. Trump is the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age. He seemed to sense intuitively – born of a combination of his experience with the New York City tabloids and his own psychological needs - that attention is all that matters.[2]
Right from the moment he descended the golden staircases of Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 to announce his Presidential candidacy by seeking the Republican nomination, Trump’s approach to politics has been the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing.[3]. No matter how outrageous his pronouncements; from calling for a total shutdown of Muslims entering the US; to mocking a learning disabled journalist; to commenting on body fluids emanating from a top female TV anchor; to decrying ‘rapist, drug dealing’ immigrants from ‘shithole countries’ like Mexico and Haiti and branding Senator John McCain a ‘loser’ for his time a POW during the Vietnam War, the gravitational pull continued to orbit towards Trump despite fruitless attempts by his Republican nominee rivals to shift the dial towards substantive policy like taxation and America’s place in the world. It was All about attracting attention to Trump.
Take one wedge issue, perhaps the wedge issue; immigration. In his first speech in 2016, perhaps cognisant of polling evidence suggesting that Republicans were more trusted on immigration than Democrats, in the first few minutes of his very first speech in 2016, he accused the Mexican government of “sending” rapists and criminals to the US which led to several businesses and organisations (including NBC, the broadcaster of his Apprentice series) severing links with him. Far from taking any notice of this corporate disapproval, he went on to regularly trumpet the infamous call to build a 2,000 mile wall around the US-Mexico border with Mexico to foot construction costs; a wall of course which was never built. Rather than being put off by a Gallup poll in June of that year showing that 66% of Americans were opposed to the wall, he then made a notorious attack on the Mexican-American heritage of a federal judge who was ruling on a lawsuit which had the desired effect of keeping immigration in the public mind. The efficacy of this strategy of the constant sounding of dog whistles was shown by the findings of a Gallup study at the end of 2016 in which voters were asked to associate word clouds with both Presidential candidates; Hillary Clinton and Trump; Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by “emails” while Trump’s featured “Mexico” and “immigration” among the top responses. This was the alchemy of Trump’s narrow electoral college victory; pulling off (among many other factors) the improbable trading of persuasion for attention, likeability for salience.[4]
Trump was to pull off the same magic hat stroke in even more outrageous fashion in the 2024 Presidential election. He accused an array of unnamed countries of emptying their prisons and psychiatric institutions in order to send their “terrorists” and “criminals” to the United States. In even more inflammatory fashion, he regurgitated an X post accusing Haitian immigrants of eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio unsurprisingly sparking a rash of hate crimes against Haitians. The preposterous nature of these allegations did not prevent a more emphatic victory for Trump in both electoral college ballots and the popular vote on a programme which promised an even more grandiose immigration policy – the largest deportation programme in the history of the USA of undocumented aliens and the deployment of US troops to the Mexican frontier to stop illegal migration. Only this time, Trump has the mandate through his control of the three branches of government, resources and so very likely definite intention to carry out his promises.
In a low attention span world, whoever gets to control the narrative win, no matter how false and malignant it is, wins. Trying to reference the overwhelming corpus of evidence that Trump is a deceitful agent of chaos and pathological narcissist becomes an exercise of futility. For what Trump grasps is that in in the hypermodern world of post-truth politics and Big Tech systematically untroubled by falsehood, legend will always trump (if it is possible to forgive the use of that pun!) history. Intoxicating, reassuring or retributive emotions will eclipse complex, awkward and nuanced facts.[5]
Donald Trump has arguably been the greatest beneficiary of our species-wide attention deficit disorder. In 2018, the average human attention span was found to have fallen only 12 seconds in 2000 to only eight seconds – less than the nine managed by goldfish.[6] In this attention deficit age, as already pointed out, the need for attention becomes exclusive. If you cannot be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say and in the new model for public debate in which attention is the end goal in itself to be seized by any means possible. By the 1980s, the dominant mode of political communication was the minute-long ad. Compare that to the Lincoln-Douglas contest for the Illinois state senate in 1858 where both contenders in the debate faced up to each other in 90-minute speeches and the efficacy of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercial seems irrefutable.[7]
Concern about the deleterious effect of new media is not new. The idea that dumb media makes humanity dumber was part of the very earliest critiques of newspapers, pamphlets and the tabloid press in the late 18th century. [8] In reality, this new media and the ‘coffee house’ culture of radical dissent surely enabled the dissemination and salience of the Enlightenment philosophy movements which acted as midwives to the French Revolution in 1789 and to radical moments in the 19th century such as the 1848 Revolutions.
In the 20th century the media of concern was television. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author Neil Postman argued that for the first 150 years of its existence the US was a culture of readers and writers and that the written word be it of pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons girded not only public conversation but democratic institutions themselves. Postman argued that television put paid to all that by replacing our written culture with a culture of meaningless images. He wrote:
The first step in winning any public debate, be it at high school or televised presidential or prime ministerial forums, or to persuade others of the veracity of one’s arguments (“winning friends and influencing people”) is to marshal the evidence for your case. Persuasion not the message itself is the key. Or so it used to be. Now gaining attention is the key in our hyper-communicative world where gaining clicks are the new means of attracting followers and of forming electoral constituencies. The main determinant of our modern communications landscape has of course been the Internet. The World Wide Web really did bring new voices into a national conversation far too long dominated by narrow white, male and affluent bandwidths. Unfortunately it did not return our democratic culture and types of thought and deliberation to a more serious and reflective era. The time honoured rules of communicative engagement have been jettisoned in favour of the meme culture – the amalgam of word and image that is the offspring of the short written statement and digital video output.[1]
Into the global cacophony of sound where everybody had to shout to be heard and where variants of same snippets of language, phrases and slogans were chewed over by globalised yet silo isolated participants in inchoate conversations, entered the emptiest vessel of all but the possessor of the greatest megaphone of all – Donald Trump. He understood the golden rule of this global space of noise – the people shouting the loudest still get the most attention. Trump is the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age. He seemed to sense intuitively – born of a combination of his experience with the New York City tabloids and his own psychological needs - that attention is all that matters.[2]
Right from the moment he descended the golden staircases of Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 to announce his Presidential candidacy by seeking the Republican nomination, Trump’s approach to politics has been the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing.[3]. No matter how outrageous his pronouncements; from calling for a total shutdown of Muslims entering the US; to mocking a learning disabled journalist; to commenting on body fluids emanating from a top female TV anchor; to decrying ‘rapist, drug dealing’ immigrants from ‘shithole countries’ like Mexico and Haiti and branding Senator John McCain a ‘loser’ for his time a POW during the Vietnam War, the gravitational pull continued to orbit towards Trump despite fruitless attempts by his Republican nominee rivals to shift the dial towards substantive policy like taxation and America’s place in the world. It was All about attracting attention to Trump.
Take one wedge issue, perhaps the wedge issue; immigration. In his first speech in 2016, perhaps cognisant of polling evidence suggesting that Republicans were more trusted on immigration than Democrats, in the first few minutes of his very first speech in 2016, he accused the Mexican government of “sending” rapists and criminals to the US which led to several businesses and organisations (including NBC, the broadcaster of his Apprentice series) severing links with him. Far from taking any notice of this corporate disapproval, he went on to regularly trumpet the infamous call to build a 2,000 mile wall around the US-Mexico border with Mexico to foot construction costs; a wall of course which was never built. Rather than being put off by a Gallup poll in June of that year showing that 66% of Americans were opposed to the wall, he then made a notorious attack on the Mexican-American heritage of a federal judge who was ruling on a lawsuit which had the desired effect of keeping immigration in the public mind. The efficacy of this strategy of the constant sounding of dog whistles was shown by the findings of a Gallup study at the end of 2016 in which voters were asked to associate word clouds with both Presidential candidates; Hillary Clinton and Trump; Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by “emails” while Trump’s featured “Mexico” and “immigration” among the top responses. This was the alchemy of Trump’s narrow electoral college victory; pulling off (among many other factors) the improbable trading of persuasion for attention, likeability for salience.[4]
Trump was to pull off the same magic hat stroke in even more outrageous fashion in the 2024 Presidential election. He accused an array of unnamed countries of emptying their prisons and psychiatric institutions in order to send their “terrorists” and “criminals” to the United States. In even more inflammatory fashion, he regurgitated an X post accusing Haitian immigrants of eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio unsurprisingly sparking a rash of hate crimes against Haitians. The preposterous nature of these allegations did not prevent a more emphatic victory for Trump in both electoral college ballots and the popular vote on a programme which promised an even more grandiose immigration policy – the largest deportation programme in the history of the USA of undocumented aliens and the deployment of US troops to the Mexican frontier to stop illegal migration. Only this time, Trump has the mandate through his control of the three branches of government, resources and so very likely definite intention to carry out his promises.
In a low attention span world, whoever gets to control the narrative win, no matter how false and malignant it is, wins. Trying to reference the overwhelming corpus of evidence that Trump is a deceitful agent of chaos and pathological narcissist becomes an exercise of futility. For what Trump grasps is that in in the hypermodern world of post-truth politics and Big Tech systematically untroubled by falsehood, legend will always trump (if it is possible to forgive the use of that pun!) history. Intoxicating, reassuring or retributive emotions will eclipse complex, awkward and nuanced facts.[5]
Donald Trump has arguably been the greatest beneficiary of our species-wide attention deficit disorder. In 2018, the average human attention span was found to have fallen only 12 seconds in 2000 to only eight seconds – less than the nine managed by goldfish.[6] In this attention deficit age, as already pointed out, the need for attention becomes exclusive. If you cannot be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say and in the new model for public debate in which attention is the end goal in itself to be seized by any means possible. By the 1980s, the dominant mode of political communication was the minute-long ad. Compare that to the Lincoln-Douglas contest for the Illinois state senate in 1858 where both contenders in the debate faced up to each other in 90-minute speeches and the efficacy of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercial seems irrefutable.[7]
Concern about the deleterious effect of new media is not new. The idea that dumb media makes humanity dumber was part of the very earliest critiques of newspapers, pamphlets and the tabloid press in the late 18th century. [8] In reality, this new media and the ‘coffee house’ culture of radical dissent surely enabled the dissemination and salience of the Enlightenment philosophy movements which acted as midwives to the French Revolution in 1789 and to radical moments in the 19th century such as the 1848 Revolutions.
In the 20th century the media of concern was television. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author Neil Postman argued that for the first 150 years of its existence the US was a culture of readers and writers and that the written word be it of pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons girded not only public conversation but democratic institutions themselves. Postman argued that television put paid to all that by replacing our written culture with a culture of meaningless images. He wrote:
Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other… They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.
Comparing the respective dystopias portrayed by Orwell in 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World where in the former all information is controlled by the state and people are bludgeoned 24/7 by North Korea style propaganda and in the latter where people are somatised by too much entertainment and distraction, it is fair to see that Huxley’s vision was the more accurate forecast.[9]
The reduction of consumers “passivity and egoism” a la Huxley that Postman feared has to be some extent been vindicated by studies such as the longitudinal research into the cognitive effects on Italians of viewing the sun, sand, soccer and soft porn output of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire which found brain rot or literal loss of cognition by very young and very old viewers exposed to it. The coarsening effects of the Britain’s notorious tabloid press on the public sphere and its institutionalized pro-Conservative and pro-Brexit bias is well attested to. However it is important not to discount the positive effect of public service broadcasting and “newspapers of record” like the New York Times, Guardian and the Irish Times on shaping political and societal discourse. Major news anchors such as Walter Cronkite and Richard Dimbleby and his sons, David and Jonathon were trusted and authoritative public figures in the eyes of TV audiences in the analogue era. Sadly, no such trusted authority figure has been able to rise above today’s cacophony of 24 hour rolling news channels and inundated digital media landscape.
But never mind, the internet promised, for many, a new era of democratised global conversation; no longer would the Lord Chamberlains or the Boards of Film and Video Classification or the Board of Governors at the BBC at as the gatekeepers or moral guardians of what we, the consumer-citizen, could watch or listen to. No more reliance of the bottom dollar, crass commercial calculus of the megacorporations on what their “customers”, sorry audiences, “wanted”. Res Publica were going to assume the democratic control of the means of communication.
Sorry, but any theorist of oligopolistic capitalism could have warned us of what would happen next. The Silicon Valley tech bros, whether Musk at X/Twitter; Zuckerberg at Meta or Bezos at Amazon, gained control of the vast digital sphere through predictive tools such as algorithms and clickbait prompts to attract the scandal or gossip addled addicts; always staying several steps ahead of regulators; and most startlingly, endorsing their preferred electoral candidates with unlimited financial largesse and making the most outrageous interventions in the internal politics of democratic states.
In this brave new world, stories are ranked and covering according to criteria of titillation, rubber necking fascination and wilful ignorance of events outside one’s geographical and attention span. Contrast the coverage two events at sea involving loss of life in the same week. On 18th June 2023, the Titan, a small deep-ocean submersible, lost communication contact after it departed for a tour around the ruins of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The five passengers inside the minivan pod had 96 hours of oxygen and an international rescue mission was quickly undertaken attracting wall-to-wall coverage. In the same week, another dreadful but sadly not uncommon maritime disaster occurred in the Mediterranean when a fishing boat filled with hundreds of migrants from Pakistan, Egypt and Syria capsized on their way to Italy. Hundreds of men, women and children perished while a nearby Greek coastguard ship did nothing to rescue them. This sea catastrophe received an infinitesimal proportion of the attention paid to the deaths of the five passengers on the Titan who, it transpired, had died when the vessel imploded early in its journey.[10]
The story of these two tragedies is a morality tale of the attention deficit media ecosystem. The search for survivors on the Titan was a rolling public event focused on “people like us” involving millions of dollars spent on the rescue mission by the US, Canadian and French governments. No such resources were devoted to the rescue of the refugees in the Mediterranean, conspicuously not “people like us”. The literal coast of a human life depends in no small part on how attention-grabbing the death was.[11]
The reduction of consumers “passivity and egoism” a la Huxley that Postman feared has to be some extent been vindicated by studies such as the longitudinal research into the cognitive effects on Italians of viewing the sun, sand, soccer and soft porn output of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire which found brain rot or literal loss of cognition by very young and very old viewers exposed to it. The coarsening effects of the Britain’s notorious tabloid press on the public sphere and its institutionalized pro-Conservative and pro-Brexit bias is well attested to. However it is important not to discount the positive effect of public service broadcasting and “newspapers of record” like the New York Times, Guardian and the Irish Times on shaping political and societal discourse. Major news anchors such as Walter Cronkite and Richard Dimbleby and his sons, David and Jonathon were trusted and authoritative public figures in the eyes of TV audiences in the analogue era. Sadly, no such trusted authority figure has been able to rise above today’s cacophony of 24 hour rolling news channels and inundated digital media landscape.
But never mind, the internet promised, for many, a new era of democratised global conversation; no longer would the Lord Chamberlains or the Boards of Film and Video Classification or the Board of Governors at the BBC at as the gatekeepers or moral guardians of what we, the consumer-citizen, could watch or listen to. No more reliance of the bottom dollar, crass commercial calculus of the megacorporations on what their “customers”, sorry audiences, “wanted”. Res Publica were going to assume the democratic control of the means of communication.
Sorry, but any theorist of oligopolistic capitalism could have warned us of what would happen next. The Silicon Valley tech bros, whether Musk at X/Twitter; Zuckerberg at Meta or Bezos at Amazon, gained control of the vast digital sphere through predictive tools such as algorithms and clickbait prompts to attract the scandal or gossip addled addicts; always staying several steps ahead of regulators; and most startlingly, endorsing their preferred electoral candidates with unlimited financial largesse and making the most outrageous interventions in the internal politics of democratic states.
In this brave new world, stories are ranked and covering according to criteria of titillation, rubber necking fascination and wilful ignorance of events outside one’s geographical and attention span. Contrast the coverage two events at sea involving loss of life in the same week. On 18th June 2023, the Titan, a small deep-ocean submersible, lost communication contact after it departed for a tour around the ruins of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The five passengers inside the minivan pod had 96 hours of oxygen and an international rescue mission was quickly undertaken attracting wall-to-wall coverage. In the same week, another dreadful but sadly not uncommon maritime disaster occurred in the Mediterranean when a fishing boat filled with hundreds of migrants from Pakistan, Egypt and Syria capsized on their way to Italy. Hundreds of men, women and children perished while a nearby Greek coastguard ship did nothing to rescue them. This sea catastrophe received an infinitesimal proportion of the attention paid to the deaths of the five passengers on the Titan who, it transpired, had died when the vessel imploded early in its journey.[10]
The story of these two tragedies is a morality tale of the attention deficit media ecosystem. The search for survivors on the Titan was a rolling public event focused on “people like us” involving millions of dollars spent on the rescue mission by the US, Canadian and French governments. No such resources were devoted to the rescue of the refugees in the Mediterranean, conspicuously not “people like us”. The literal coast of a human life depends in no small part on how attention-grabbing the death was.[11]
Predictably and rightly, these ideas have been globally condemned for their violation of two basic international norms – forcible seizure of territory and forced displacement (ethnic cleansing) of populations. But, as discussed earlier, the sheer outrageousness and implausibility of these proposals have already succeeded in focusing so much global bandwidth on the Narcissist-in-Chief. We have already seen how Trump’s megaphonic, racially charged but carefully crafted rantings on immigration did shift the dial on issue despite his defiance what used to be the laws of political gravity on the use of discriminatory language by candidates for the highest office in the land. Will Trump’s fantasies about the future of Gaza also shift the dial in the direction of the unthinkable; in this case is he giving cover to the fantasies of the far right nationalists in the Israeli cabinet of evicting Palestinians from the “demolition site” that they have helped to create and resettle it with Israelis? As the Gaza ceasefire holds ever so tentatively, one dreads to contemplate such a scenario.
Social media is commonly blamed for the low-attention span, clickbait aroused and silo reinforcing cultural landscape of our times. However, just as William Caxton cannot be blamed for the destructive use of the printing press by the religious agitators who helped lay the field for the post-Reformation wars in 17th century Europe; so Tim Berners-Lee, as inventor of the World Wide Web, cannot be held accountable for the degeneration of what was intended to be an emancipatory communications project into the dystopian space that many find it to be. Just as guns do not kill people (not a defence of the position of the NRA, I hasten to add); it is those who use them and the permissive cultures that enable their possession by those who should never have access to them; so digital communication tools and systems on their own have not torn asunder societies and degraded the public sphere but their wealthy and empire building proprietors. Just as it is impossible to uninvent guns and other weapons of war, so digital technology cannot be neutralized by Luddite forces; what both weapons and social media technologies require are rigorous regulation to prevent their ownership and use by bad actors.
Finally, the effectiveness of right-wing populists in telling their stories, malignant though it is, in digital space carries lessons for liberals and leftists when getting their messages across in this medium. Progressives can and need to rise above promising mere technocratic competence are retail offers; they can and need to tell their stories about social justice and the better angels of humanity in passionate, authentic but non-manipulative cameo like fashion. After all it’s what the algorithms recognise.
Social media is commonly blamed for the low-attention span, clickbait aroused and silo reinforcing cultural landscape of our times. However, just as William Caxton cannot be blamed for the destructive use of the printing press by the religious agitators who helped lay the field for the post-Reformation wars in 17th century Europe; so Tim Berners-Lee, as inventor of the World Wide Web, cannot be held accountable for the degeneration of what was intended to be an emancipatory communications project into the dystopian space that many find it to be. Just as guns do not kill people (not a defence of the position of the NRA, I hasten to add); it is those who use them and the permissive cultures that enable their possession by those who should never have access to them; so digital communication tools and systems on their own have not torn asunder societies and degraded the public sphere but their wealthy and empire building proprietors. Just as it is impossible to uninvent guns and other weapons of war, so digital technology cannot be neutralized by Luddite forces; what both weapons and social media technologies require are rigorous regulation to prevent their ownership and use by bad actors.
Finally, the effectiveness of right-wing populists in telling their stories, malignant though it is, in digital space carries lessons for liberals and leftists when getting their messages across in this medium. Progressives can and need to rise above promising mere technocratic competence are retail offers; they can and need to tell their stories about social justice and the better angels of humanity in passionate, authentic but non-manipulative cameo like fashion. After all it’s what the algorithms recognise.
References
[1] Chris Hayes A guy walks in with a megaphone … How attention became the world’s most valuable resource – and broke our politics. Guardian. The Long Read - 28th January 2025 pp 6-8
[2] Ibid, p.6
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid, p.7
[5] Matthew Ancona The King of Manifest Destiny. The New European Issue 420 16-22 January 2025 PP.12-13
[6] Ibid, p.13
[7] Hayes, p.6
[1] Chris Hayes A guy walks in with a megaphone … How attention became the world’s most valuable resource – and broke our politics. Guardian. The Long Read - 28th January 2025 pp 6-8
[2] Ibid, p.6
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid, p.7
[5] Matthew Ancona The King of Manifest Destiny. The New European Issue 420 16-22 January 2025 PP.12-13
[6] Ibid, p.13
[7] Hayes, p.6
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
Legacy mainstream media does nothing whether in print nor on video that would be against the interests of whom owns them. As stated before; they have been shown to lie their arses off when it suits them. Think back to the start of the pandemic and their ridicule of those of us who pointed out it escaped from that lab...a fact even the CIA confirms today.
ReplyDelete"Social" ( read the masses) media has upended the trolley cart and threatens not only their revenue (via ads) but also the hegemony of their owners ( like Murdoch et al).
Trump/Musk recognize that an bypass them. The real question is why what Trump/Musk are pushing is so much more attractive to voters that what the Democrats offered (more woke shite)- and by extension why this resonates across Europe with the rise of right wing parties.
Trump/Musk are symptoms not the cause.
A glitch caused part of this article not to appear.
ReplyDeleteIt has since been tackled - the missing bit appears at the end after reference point 11.
Thanks as ever Barry for a thoughtful piece of work.