5. The Future of Attention

Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.

In this final episode, he considers where our media consumption might be headed. Many are concerned about smartphone addiction and a disintegration of public discourse, but others see a brighter future and our current times as a turning point to a world where the capacities of technology are used to benefit of society.

Matthew speaks to a former tech engineer who has become a philosopher and activist on attention, a historian who believes that our current era has many precedents, a psychologist who is wary of headlines about collapsed attention spans and a behavioural economist who can see a way that our society will adapt to the digital world.

Contributors:

James Williams, author of Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy Matthew Sweet, Historian and Broadcaster Professor Pete Etchells, Psychologist, Bath Spa University and author of Unlocked: The Science of Screen Time and How to Spend it Better Michael Muthukrishna, Associate Professor of Economic Psychology and author of A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of who we are, how we got here and where we are going.

Presenter: Matthew Syed Producer: Sam Peach