BROADCASTS.com

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us \u2014 fractured, irritated, overwhelmed.\n\nD. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of \u201chuman fracking\u201d: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us. And he argues that it\u2019s now reached a point that calls for a kind of revolution. \u201cThis is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this,\u201d he tells me. \u201cAnd we need to mount new forms of resistance.\u201d\n\nBurnett is a professor of the history of science at Princeton University and is working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. He\u2019s also a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grass roots, artistic effort to create a curriculum for studying attention.\n\nIn this conversation, we talk about how the 20th-century study of attention laid the groundwork for today\u2019s attention economy, the connection between changing ideas of attention and changing ideas of the self, how we even define attention (this episode is worth listening to for Burnett\u2019s collection of beautiful metaphors alone), whether the concern over our shrinking attention spans is simply a moral panic, what it means to teach attention and more.\n\nMentioned:\n\nFriends of Attention\n\n\u201cThe Battle for Attention\u201d by Nathan Heller\n\n\u201cPowerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back.\u201d by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt\n\nScenes of Attention edited by D. Graham Burnett and Justin E. H. Smith\n\nBook Recommendations:\n\nAddiction by Design by Natasha Dow Sch\xfcll\n\nObjectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter L. Galison\n\nThe Confidence-Man by Herman Melville\n\nThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.\n\nYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\u201d at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.\n\nThis episode of \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\u201d was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show\u2019s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.