Government-Induced Attention Deficit and the First Amendment

            Many Americans feel fatigued by information. A seemingly unlimited amount of information is available at the scroll of a smartphone. Even when one does not seek information, information is impressed upon her by others who vie for her attention. But information overload may not be the central problem. Rather, “[o]ur true plight – in this world of overfilled inboxes, push notifications and digital billboards, [may be] an overload of attempted communication: a cacophony of efforts to stake a claim on our attention.” See Oliver Burkeman, Attentional Commons, in #17 New Philosopher, at 21-22 (Aug.-Oct. 2017).

            People do not normally view attention as a limited resource whose unwanted or unwelcomed depletion alters the way they make decisions or manage their day to day lives. A recent article by Oliver Burkeman calls attention to attention seeking and challenges readers to rethink the way they think about unwelcomed claims on their attention. Any unwelcomed claim on one’s attention constitutes “spam”—“any attempt to ‘exploit existing gatherings of attention.’” See id.

            Most unwelcomed claims on people’s attention go unnoticed or shrugged off, like birds singing, sirens blaring, babies crying, but even these require a (slight) dip in one’s attention account. Greater still are claims on one’s attention from unwelcomed emails, product placements in movies and television (including the news), and billboards, and “by experts at social media companies whose job is to deploy every psychological trick they can to extend your ‘time on site.’” See id.

            Though Burkeman primarily focused on product placement advertisements, an underlying and unstated concern arises with the rise of government officials employing social media accounts to capture citizens’ attention: Is government-official-induced attention seeking encroaching on citizens’ freedom of thought and speech? It very well may be.

Government officials take to Twitter and Facebook, among other social medial venues, to capture citizens’ attention. Some tweets or messages might constitute legitimate attempts to create meaningful dialogue or relay important information to constituents. Still other tweets or messages might constitute attempts to distort or distract from the truth or discourage fact-finding. When the tweet or message comes from an elected official, the attention-demand placed on each constituent is high because the cost of opting out may be extremely costly. Not only might one forgo opportunities to advance local policies, or to hold an official accountable when one opts out, but he or she also risks emboldening government officials to do whatever they please.

Yet, the cost of opting-in is also high. Every second a person directs to unsolicited tweets, messages, or blurbs is a second undevoted to her own thoughts, personal development, family, friends, loved ones, hobbies, peace of mind. Even should one ignore the government-official tweet now, chances are likely that media conglomerates like CNN, MSNBC, or FOX, will bombard her with the tweet or message. No one can easily escape a government official tweet when the government official wishes to capture people’s attention.

And when one opts in, whether voluntarily or out of defeat, she becomes a conduit for misinformation, distorted information, information funneled through political spin, so much so that whatever might be true looks as distorted or spun as everything else. Hannah Arendt put it best:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie – a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days – but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can do what you please.

            Government-induced attention deficit presses hard against citizens’ freedom of speech and thought, because it alters the way they perceive and think about truth, and shortens each citizens opportunity to focus on what he or she pleases. Freedom of speech and thought lie at the core of liberty.  Though many philosophers, statesmen, and legal practitioners have opined on the value of free speech and thought, Justice Louis Brandies captured best the value of free speech and thought in our constitutional scheme:

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make [people] free to develop their faculties, and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. . . They believed that freedom to think as you will and speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of American government.

Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring).