They Want Your Attention. Don’t Give It to Them.
We need to be more
disciplined about feeding the trolls.
Opinion
writer at large
- July
23, 2020
Last
year, I wrote a column about the U.S. World Cup team and the
unexpected lesson it taught us on its march to world domination: Our greatest
weapon is our attention and how we choose to wield it.
The
U.S. team understood that its dominance and fearlessness to address inequities
in the sport would spark controversy and invite critics (including President
Trump) to try to hijack the moment for personal gain. The team members
sidestepped the usual traps — when the President turned his Twitter feed on
them, they didn’t engage directly. Instead they used the spotlight it created
to highlight what mattered to them: their gender-discrimination lawsuit,
for one. It worked.
Their
lesson feels especially resonant right now as we attempt to navigate one of the
most tumultuous moments in many Americans’ lifetimes. The most privileged of us
are trapped in our homes and glued to the internet, hiding from a deadly virus,
and our attention appears not only frayed but also deeply unfocused (myself
very much included). Our worst impulses are winning out.
Take some of the national media’s preoccupation with examining
our cascading national crises through the narrow lens of free speech and cancel
culture. One camp argues that the boundaries of acceptable conversation are
shrinking, creating a chilling effect on speech that is “illiberal.” This crowd
wrote an open letter alluding
to it in Harper’s that set the internet ablaze for weeks (weeks!).
This
debate is about power in an era dominated by the internet, which means it’s
also, ultimately, about attention. The camp that is worried about
“illiberalism” seems to understand this better than the camp arguing that the
cancel-culture critics are elite public intellectual grifters.
This
crowd knows that this line of argument is irresistible to the navel-gazing
circles of media and politics (and opinion sections like this one). It is
perfectly calibrated to spark outrage online — especially at this moment of
political and social unrest. If my time shackled to online discourse has taught
me anything, it’s this: Using a social media platform to argue that your voice
is being silenced is an amplification cheat code, a surefire way to find an
audience and turn your voice into the loudest in the room.
Some
(but not all) of the free speech defenders are extremely effective attention
hijackers. A cynic might argue that they saw an important national conversation
where attention was focused on protest (arguably the purest exercise of one’s
speech), racial justice and the concerns of frequently marginalized voices —
one that they were largely on the outskirts of — and found a way to reframe
that debate to once again be at its center.
Lately,
I’ve been dwelling on a counterfactual: What if the ideological opponents of
the free speech defenders followed the road map laid out a year ago by the U.S.
women’s team? What if instead of engaging on their terms, they dismissed the
argument, ignoring it altogether?
There’s a similar dynamic at play with President Trump’s
pandemic news conferences, a spectacle the president started up again in an
attempt to reverse his disastrous approval rating on
the virus response. Because he’s the president, the national press will cover
him. It doesn’t matter that he has consistently used public appearances to
undermine public health advice and politicize a virus his administration seems
unwilling to control. The decision to devote precious airtime — even when the
impact could be harmful to public health — is framed as
an obligation to “newsworthiness.” But this framing is disingenuous.
Newsworthiness, as most journalists know, is a choice masquerading as an
inevitability. And so networks devote airtime to the president and to his
misinformation (on Wednesday he suggested children in schools won’t bring the virus home),
to his cynical change in “tone” and
to diversions like his relationship to a Jeffery Epstein enabler, Ghislaine
Maxwell.
The
American public collectively seems unable to break or divert our attention, even
when we know it may be harmful to those who seek it. That seems to be the case
with the recent fixation on Kanye West and his dubious presidential campaign
and very public mental health breakdown. In an excellent essay,
Andre Gee argued that Mr. West’s personal turmoil isn’t our entertainment (his
wife argued similarly in
an Instagram post on Wednesday), though many are treating it that way. Mr. Gee
makes an important distinction that Mr. West shouldn’t be coddled or absolved
because of his behavior, but that we should not become complicit and feed the
drama — by indulging his campaign or gawking at and dunking on his manic
tweeting. But because Mr. West is a towering figure in pop culture and a
masterful attention seeker, we give in and give no thought to the consequences.
“True
resistance,” the artist Jenny Odell wrote in her book “How to Do Nothing,” is
“the ability not just to withdraw attention but to invest it somewhere else, to
enlarge and proliferate it.” What if the camp that believes cancel culture is
an overhyped boogeyman followed Ms. Odell’s advice and reframed the debate so
that it centered more around the issues that matter to them: a more just,
inclusive, equitable discourse?
What
does that even look like? What if we redirected our attention based solely on
the consequences? Instead of constantly amplifying arguments we think are
unworthy (simply because it feels good to mock them), what if we choose not to give them oxygen? Why not reframe the
debate and set the terms of the conversation?
If we
want to talk about fired newspaper editors, then how about focusing on this
stat: In the first six months of 2020, more than 11,000 newsroom jobs have been
lost, according to Axios.
We could continually amplify the work of journalists like Margaret Sullivan,
who are sounding alarm bells about
the imminent death of local news. We can argue about polarization of the
Twitter discourse on the terms of those who spend all day glued to it, or we
can focus on the polarization and alienation that come when communities lose
their local news outlets. Want to talk about illiberal chilling effects and
stifled speech? How about the global attack on the independent press,
from Hungary to the Philippines?
We can
opine and argue with and stigmatize those who refuse to wear masks, or we can
direct that time and energy toward empathetic work to understand the reasons Americans
are choosing to ignore public health guidance and work to bring them onboard.
We can engage and amplify essays and open letters perfectly calibrated to
provoke rage, or we can bestow our attention on thoughtful, often overlooked
perspectives like this one. We say we want to read and to elevate diverse
voices, but we don’t always vote with our eyeballs and our shares.
Maybe
this all sounds like a rendition of the cliché “Don’t feed the trolls.”
Perhaps. But it’s also hard to ignore the fact that the attention hijackers
seem to be thriving off the attention they’ve generated. I could not imagine a
worse outcome for the free speech defenders than for their open letters and
blogs to be lost in the algorithmic sea of Facebook and Twitter, buried in a
news cycle awash in chaos. The same goes for the president. And diverting
attention from Mr. West’s antics toward a meaningful conversation about mental
health would be far more productive.
Diversion, though, requires a short-term sacrifice, often in the
form of engagement. The media and popular culture thrive off attention
hijackers. My Times colleague John Herrman described the phenomenon in a 2014 essay in The Awl, arguing that such
spectacles generate “an enormous surplus of attention, much more than news can
meet” and that “the internet’s craving for sex and humiliation is effectively
infinite. This throws the Content industry into a frantic generative mode.” A
self-perpetuating attention machine. Throwing a wrench in its gears means not
living off the output. That, as any columnist will tell you, is scary.
Where
we focus our precious attention has never been more important. “While some
American men have the relative privilege to joke around about a Kanye
presidency, there are many women, undocumented people, and members of the
L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. community for whom the election is a literal fight for their
lives,” Mr. Gee argues. “For them, the attention has to be on progress, not his
ill-fated campaign or tweets.”
We are
staring down an unfathomable crisis: nearly 150,000 Americans dead from a
pandemic that is out of control, with no government response in sight. We’re
about to confront a rolling evictions crisis, a looming financial collapse, a
momentous presidential election. The existential threat of climate change
remains unaddressed. Federal troops are clashing with protesters in a major
American city. Threaded through each of these crises is the festering wound of
systemic racism, which the country is attempting to grapple with through
intergenerational national unrest.
In other words, we have every possible reason to withdraw our
attention from those who greedily seek it and invest it somewhere else.
