The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age
By Chris Hayes
The first step in winning a public debate, indeed in any effective communication, is to get attention for your message. But that in and of itself is not enough. Attention is the means, not the end, because the end is persuasion. Once you have people’s attention, then you can try to persuade them with your evidence and arguments.
This, at least, is the traditional model of communication. The trouble is, this basic model has fallen apart. It is crumbling to dust before our eyes, though we have a hard time accepting how far gone it is. The reality is that everywhere you look, there is no longer any formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen.
Under these conditions, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.
This transformation has been a long time in the making. Before the digital age there was the TV age. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, the author Neil Postman argued that for its first 150 years the US was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium – pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons – structured not only public discourse but the institutions of democracy itself. TV destroyed all that, Postman argued, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was literally meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jan/28/the-loudest-megaphone-how-trump-mastered-our-new-attention-age
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