I’ve been paying attention to attention lately — how and what we pay attention to, the ways our attention is preyed upon and manipulated by governments and corporations, and how our attention became a commodity to be harvested and profited upon.
This attention to attention is thanks largely to Tim Wu’s book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, which I’m working my way through with a friend. While the book focuses mostly on the advertising industry — perhaps the most blatant manipulators of our individual and collective attention – it’s made me more carefully evaluate where my own attention is drawn on a day-to-day basis.
This isn’t necessarily a new reflection for me. For at least the last five years I’ve had an uneasy relationship with social media. And in the past year or so, I’ve been more careful about the news media I’m consuming — from television to radio to podcasts to websites, I’ve been more mindful of what I’m reading, watching, and listening to and its effect on me and my mental health.
In The Attention Merchants, author Tim Wu notes just how central our attention is — it has the power to shape the values and meaning in our lives: “For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”
That’s one thing I love about reading and writing for the Reformed Journal and why I’m thankful for this space to think, talk, dialogue, and reflect. In a world where there are constant competing demands for our attention — the latest breaking news story, the ever-present notifications on our phones, the newest social media app, the targeted advertising we encounter everywhere — it’s refreshing to have a space to engage with other writers, thinkers, and readers on topics of substance and on questions of faith, culture, politics, and life.
If it’s true that what we pay attention to is what gives meaning to our lives, then I think the time we all spend here in creating a space for reflection and honest conversations is well worth our while.
* But Wait…There’s More — three new books from Reformed Journal Press in 2025
- The Traveler’s Path by Doug Brouwer, early 2025
- Green Street in Black and White: A Chicago Story by Dave Larsen, late winter 2025
- Grounded by Christy Berghoef, spring 2025
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