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STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: A recent skit on "Saturday Night Live" featured a panel of cable TV news talent.
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SARAH SHERMAN: (As Rachel Maddow) Hello, and welcome to MSNBC. I'm Rachel Maddow.
INSKEEP: They're trying to report on the inauguration of President Trump. But each time they analyze something Trump did, they are interrupted by news of something else Trump did.
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EGO NWODIM: (As Joy Reid) One thing I do know is this time around, we're not going to get sucked in by every new, shiny, crazy statement from Trump. We need to focus on what he does, not what he says.
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SHERMAN: (As Rachel Maddow) I'm sorry. I have to interrupt you. We have some breaking news. Trump has apparently just told reporters that he would like to...
INSKEEP: One of the panelists parodied in this skit is MSNBC program host Chris Hayes. Of course, the real Chris Hayes saw the skit and felt it could not be better timed.
CHRIS HAYES: Interestingly, it was a satirization of precisely the conundrum I wrote the whole book about.
INSKEEP: That new book is called "The Siren's Call." It's about the battle for attention, which Internet companies, advertisers, entertainers and politicians demand of us so constantly that we can't pay attention.
You say this is not the information age - it's the attention age. What do you mean?
HAYES: Information is generative. It's infinite. The thing that is finite in the information age, as we call it, is attention. If 10 firms have your data or a thousand do, it doesn't make that big a difference in your life. But if someone has your attention, someone else can't have it. And that does make a difference in your life.
INSKEEP: I thought at first, when I started this book, that you were going to tell me about social media and the demands of social media - and you do - and the demands of your phone. But you mention that every business has rewired for this. There are many businesses that are about the brand, which is seizing attention, and not really even about the product. They could care less about the product.
HAYES: This is one of the strange things about the age we live in, in which because of sort of the global industrial production and outsourcing, the actual product has become very secondary to the brand. I mean, the swoosh is what has value for Nike, much more than the physical sneaker.
INSKEEP: You're in the attention business. What's it like to be in the attention business?
HAYES: I don't think it's great for my psyche. But I think the insights that I've gleaned from being in the attention business, in which one always feels like one is chasing attention as opposed to directing it, which I think is a central experience of it - one of the insights I think I had over the course of the last 11 years that I've been hosting a cable news show is that this experience is actually being democratized before our eyes. That the experience of desperately chasing attention, trying to figure out the whims of where it's going and how to hold it, is increasingly the experience of more and more people - particularly a younger generation that is raised on producing content for social media, whose aspirations to be famous on social media or to go viral or be influencers, as polls reflect, become a kind of dominant social model of aspiration. That this experience is now increasingly the experience everyone has.
INSKEEP: Help me understand when you say you're chasing attention as opposed to something else. Somebody might think of you as someone who commands attention, who tells people what to think or at least tells them what to pay attention to. You choose stories. People tune in. Is that not your experience?
HAYES: It's not the subjective experience, I think, of doing my job. And I think many people in the media will tell you this, that if you're on the production side of media - you're trying to get people to read your stories or listen to your radio show or podcast or watch your television show - the attentional whims of the audience feel extraneous. And the way I compare it in the book is like wind to a sailor.
INSKEEP: Oh, yeah, lay this out. I like this analogy. Go on.
HAYES: You can't control the wind, and you have to take it seriously as an actual force outside of you. If you don't do that, you're not going to get very far. At the same time, the craft that you develop over time is how to figure out how to use technique to capture that wind and move the boat in the direction you want to go. There are certain things that are capturing people's attention at a given moment, and I can't control them en masse. But what I can do is sort of sense where those winds are blowing and attempt to use my rhetorical tool kit to get the show and the audience's attention to end up in the destination that I want it to end up in.
INSKEEP: How was the attention economy a factor in the rise of Donald Trump?
HAYES: Well, I think he is the ultimate symbol of the attention age. I think because of his own personal profile, he has a kind of feral instinct for getting attention - a need for it that I think is boundless. And that need for it has led him into an insight that defines the attention age, which is that attention is the most important resource. And crucially - and this is the thing most politicians don't get - negative attention is just as good as positive attention. Or, at least, it's better than no attention.
INSKEEP: I'm thinking about Trump's media and political strategy and how it fits with some of the things that you write. You point out that it is easier to get someone's attention for a moment than it is to hold someone's attention, and Trump doesn't necessarily try to hold your attention. He gets it...
HAYES: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: ...Over and over again. Just since the election, let's take over Greenland. How about the Panama Canal? Canada. Let's rename Mount McKinley. We've gone on and on. Always there's a new thing to get our attention again.
HAYES: This is exactly right. In fact, when he tries to hold attention - famously, when he goes for 90 minutes at a rally - people leave.
INSKEEP: Yep.
HAYES: He's actually not good at holding attention. And this is a central dynamic of the attention age. It's replicated in the slot machine design of the algorithmic feed, where you just grab, grab, grab, grab, grab. You never hold attention. Everything's short. You go to the next one. Trump has the exact same - you're totally right - has the exact same approach to this. And that's because interruption and compelled attention are the circuitry that is easiest to fire in us.
INSKEEP: The impression from the outside is that MSNBC is struggling to hold people's attention. Do you see it that way?
HAYES: To go back to the wind metaphor, I think it's largely the wind at this moment. The best sailors in the world can't sail on a dead calm sea. And I think there's lots of people who have just tuned out after the election, and I totally understand that. I tend to think that is not a permanent state of affairs, the way the wind is never a permanent state of affairs. What I will say is that my experience of covering politics for the last 20 years is that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And right now, I feel like there is a kind of pressing down of a spring happening in our politics amongst what I would call the almost 50% of the country that voted against Donald Trump, or the smaller percentage that deeply, deeply dislikes him and think he's bad for the country. And I can feel that spring being pushed down and pushed down and pushed down. And it's now out of view, but I don't think it's going to stay out of view.
INSKEEP: Chris Hayes of MSNBC is the author of a new book, "The Siren's Call: How Attention Became The World's Most Endangered Resource." Pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
HAYES: Thank you, Steve.
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