Unpacking the Attention Fetish

What happens when we learn to see our stories as instruments for attracting attention?

Photo by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

One icy day this winter, I opened my iPad, clicked on the HBO Max app, and started looking for something to watch while I put in my time on the treadmill.

As I scrolled through my options, I noticed, for the umpteenth time, the thumbnail of a docuseries called The Curious Case of Natalia Grace. I'd see some chatter online about this series, but I couldn't remember if it was the good kind of chatter or the bad kind of chatter.

Curious Case is a docuseries about a disabled girl who was adopted from an orphanage in Ukraine and eventually placed with a family in the United States. Natalia may or may not, it turns out, be much older than initially purported. She may or may not be violent and manipulative toward her adoptive parents. She may or may not have suffered severe abuse at the hands of her adoptive mother.

I love buzzy docuseries, but my taste tends toward the cultish or corrupt. Being that there was no cult or shady business at the center of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, it fell outside my usual fare. But I gave it a try.

Embarrassingly enough, I binge-watched the series, devouring both seasons in a whirlwind of treadmill sessions, laundry, and bread baking. I had to learn the truth.

Or at least "the truth."

The Curious Case of Natalia Grace is produced and edited for maximum shock value.

It gives you the impression that some bad things were happening with this family, but you never really get a sense of what's true and what's a good story. The father, the main character throughout the first season, is blatantly an unreliable narrator. He comes off as a grifter, someone so insecure with his place in the world that he's convinced himself of his victimhood and greatness simultaneously.

In the second season, Natalia gets the starring role so she can tell her side of the story—but she's also unreliable. All in all, her account seems relatively sincere, even if her past (and ongoing) trauma makes it difficult to take everything she says as objective truth.

In terms of entertainment, this docuseries has it all: violence, sex, psychological abuse, and more twists and turns than an M. Night Shyamalan movie. In terms of ethical documentary-making, well, I'm no expert—but my impression is that it's severely lacking.

I'm confident, however, that this docuseries was painstakingly designed to grab my attention—and never let it go.

That our attention is a valuable commodity is not news. That our attention is actively courted by salacious stories and clickbait headlines is equally unexceptional.

Today, I want to consider how our fetish for attention shapes us as producers and subjects.

I started to think more about my cringey experience with The Curious Case after I listened to a podcast series called Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, developed by artist and audio producer Jess Shane.

Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.

The Hook

Jess wanted to highlight what she saw as some of the most problematic aspects of documentary-making. She came up with the idea to examine documentary ethics by making a documentary series, as one does. She pitched the show around and wound up working with Radiotopia to make it a reality.

Jess wanted to expose the transactional nature of contemporary pop documentary production. Not unlike social media and reality TV, buzzy documentaries like The Curious Case of Natalia Grace vie for our attention with drama, suspense, shock, heartbreak, and transformation. While there are plenty of ethically and artistically oriented documentarians, many producers and filmmakers use other people's stories to generate a product made to appeal to audiences.

Studios invest in these projects because it makes good business sense. The more attention a story attracts, the more valuable it becomes. The audience's attention is a commodity to be sold to advertisers or, in the case of HBO Max, captivating the audience's attention is the ticket to long-term recurring revenue and new subscribers.

The Making of Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative

Jess's first step to make her project was to post an ad on Craigslist advertising the opportunity to be featured in a documentary. She included that she was casting for a project about documentary ethics. "Almost 300 people responded to my ad," Jess told me in an interview, "and I interviewed 30 people."

In the auditions, she asked each potential subject what story they wanted to tell, why she should choose them, and why they wanted to be in a documentary. Then, Jess and her potential subjects talked about the project itself, and she answered any questions they had.

"I had some suspicions about why people want to tell their stories in documentaries, and those suspicions were not severe enough," Jess explained. She's encountered people who want to be famous and improve their personal brand. She's also met people who want to shed light on an injustice they've suffered. Some subjects want to change the world or move public opinion. Still others are angry and want to let off some steam.

However, another group want to tell their stories because they need someone to talk to. They're looking for therapy, and appearing in a documentary seems to be one way to access something similar.

Jess featured three subjects in her series, an aspiring designer navigating the very sketchy modeling industry, an unhoused woman wrestling with the eviction and tenants' rights, and a formerly incarcerated man trying to break into motivational speaking. "I chose them for their power dynamics," she explained, "I didn't choose them for their stories. I chose someone who wanted to be famous, somebody who wanted therapy, and somebody who wanted help."

Curating Stories

In her book Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling, Sujatha Fernandes analyzes what she calls "the political economy of storytelling." Specifically, she looks at how social movements, politicians, and philanthropic organizations use stories to further their goals. She also interrogates the way storytelling is used for therapeutic value while often defanging or obfuscating the structural violence at the center of many powerful stories.

The currents of neoliberalism gradually instrumentalized storytelling over the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of empowering mass social movements, stories were "repurposed by states, international agencies, and the culture industries" and "reoriented toward transaction and negotiation." Stripped of their context to avoid structural or social analysis, stories produced "subjects who are guided by [the neoliberal] principles of upward mobility, entrepreneurship, and self-reliance."

Fernandes writes:

Those who participate in this self-making often have aspirations of class mobility, due to their educational opportunities, niche position in the economy, or access to structures of funding. Yet despite the desire for individual personal advancement, the majority of those who tell their stories are not able to improve their conditions.

While Fernandes focuses her analysis on how curated stories are used for political and social purposes, it also explains why the chance to "tell your story" on social media, reality TV, or in a documentary project can be so appealing.

Fernandes published Curated Stories in 2017. But even since then, the theoretical economic, social, and personal benefits of "telling your story" have compounded. Whether or not you put your story down in a book or sign away your life rights to a studio, we get the not-exactly-subconscious message that our life is a product and that we're the main character. Every time we open a social media app, we're encouraged to turn our lives into content—content that looks surprisingly like the reality TV and docudramas that fill our streaming service feeds.

The feminist movement of the '60s and '70s galvanized around the idea that the "personal is political," sharing stories with each other to organize and heal in community. Referencing Fernandes, Jess told me that today the role of storytelling is different. "The personal is personal," she remarked, "You tell your story, and that's supposed to be the final frontier, the final boss of overcoming your trauma."

The Story as a Commodity

The neoliberal mode of storytelling seems to be equal parts self-healing, self-promotion, and self-reliance. And all of that "self business" makes it really hard for those stories to create collective outcomes. By recasting politically potent stories as acts of personal bravery and vulnerability, entrenched powers disrupt our ability to connect on a class level.

In The Crisis of Narration, Byung-Chul Han calls this mode of storytelling storyselling:

Narratives now mainly serve commercial interests. ... Narratives are produced and consumed like commodities. ... Through these narratives, we refer not to a community that is to be improved, but only to our own egos.

The self-selected narrative subject chooses to tell their story for—and I mean this with all sincerity—attention. For them, attention might look more like belonging and connection. But attention also creates the potential for financial reward and social power. Attention closes the gap between precarity and stability, between insecurity and safety.

The Attention Fetish

Attention becomes a fetish. Fetishism, as Marxist scholar David Harvey explains, is "the habit humans have of endowing real or imagined objects or entities with self-contained, mysterious, and even magical powers to move and shape the world in distinctive ways." Marx uses the notion of commodity fetishism to describe how we imbue commodities with inherent value rather than perceiving the value of a commodity as derived from the human labor used to produce it.

A commodity could be a symbol for the people who made it, the time they labored, and the craft they practiced. But what happens when we see the people behind a commodity? Well, we start to get pretty concerned about their welfare. The focus on commodities—especially consumer goods—allows us to ignore the plight of workers and the impact on the planet.

In fact, I remember a DoorDash commercial from a few years back that featured groceries delivering themselves to someone's front door. That's commodity fetishism in a nutshell—pun intended. Delivery person? What delivery person?!

If commodity fetishism entails locating the value of a good in that good rather than in the labor used to create it, I want to propose that attention fetishism locates the value of story or insight in the attention it creates rather than what that story or insight actually illuminates.

Stories do have incredible value. But when a story is shaped and molded in such a way as to maximize attention, it tends to erase the people and personal, social, and political stakes at its center. We see the person on screen or in our feed, but what we're really focused on is the shock, the heartbreak, the transformation.

As story subjects and story producers, we should consider the impact of attention fetishism on our own identities and the potential for alienation from our own stories.

Alienated From Our Own Stories

As the subject of a documentary, one becomes alienated from their own story. It becomes the raw material for someone else's vision. This was one of Jess's biggest misgivings about the whole industry.

"People who sign up to be in documentaries don't understand what they're signing up for," she explained. Subjects are surprised when what they say is used in service of something they don't agree with. How they see their story is ultimately going to be different from how a producer (and audience) see their story. Jess said that people also don't realize that their story "will have a life beyond them and that it will stay static as they continue to change."

You don't have to be a documentary subject to experience this. I will reflexively convert a personal story into a lesson or metaphor—sometimes even as it's happening. I've learned to experience life as a series of content opportunities. And I know I'm not alone.

Kate Tyson

once texted me a screenshot of a LinkedIn update that started with an eye-catching line about checking into the emergency room. After teasing that the experience got them thinking, the update pivoted to ask, "What can an emergency room visit teach you about running a better business?" For all I know, the rest of the post was thoughtful and well-considered. It’s not the content itself that’s at issue. The issue (or one of them) is what happens when our creative reflex becomes turning a personal story into valuable content.

Our stories cease to be our stories—and become instruments for attracting attention.

"I wanted to make something that would expose all of these hypocrisies, that would perform some of the issues that I was seeing," Jess explained. While people do talk about the ethics of documentary, she told me that there are far fewer conversations about how these ethics (or lack thereof) relate to "money and capital and the huge-scale commercialization of this industry."

To draw out these connections, Jess gave herself a few rules for her project. The purpose of the rules was to obviate the problems in the industry as she saw them. They weren't an earnest attempt to 'do documentary better' so much as a performance of the problems themselves.

First, Jess committed to paying each subject $20 per hour for all of the time they spent on the project. Second, she was clear from the jump with each subject: this is a transaction. She wanted to know their motivations, and she wanted them to know her motivations.

The final rule was that each participant would have editorial agency over their stories. They picked which story to tell. They shared with her how they wanted the story told. And Jess played each episode for them to get feedback and have them sign off on the project before it went live.

These rules and the candor with which Jess navigates them make for some very uncomfortable listening. At least, it was super uncomfortable for me! I've been known to binge hundreds of episodes of a podcast in a month or two. But Jess's five-episode series took me a couple of weeks to get through. It was excellent and also deeply discomfiting.

And that was the point. Because it allowed Jess to poke at some other aspects of the attention fetish.

Main Character Energy

There was one final documentary subject to cast—the role that Jess played as host. In the final episode of the series, she explains how she couldn't have sold the show without a compelling main character. And since she didn't have any characters when she sold the show, she needed to provide that main character energy.

Jess wanted to play off of the trope of the "well-meaning, privileged white lady who has a question and goes on a quest to figure it out." That was the persona she took on—even as she explained the rules and guided the audience through her process.

"I think about this series as institutional critique," Jess explained. "I was using the medium of the podcast, including the business of the podcast, as a framework for raising questions about how we do things." It's that kind of critique that helps us see the structures and systems that attention fetishism obscures or erases from view.

I've found myself thinking about The Curious Case of Natalia Grace in light of my conversation with Jess. What level of transparency did the various subjects have on the way they'd be portrayed? What were they hoping to get out of this production beyond attention? How did the producers balance business needs with human needs? What would they do differently if they weren't courting attention? The list could go on and on.

If the point is to question this industry, the people who navigate it, and the audiences who consume it, Jess's project is a success.

Take Stories Seriously

We are storytelling creatures. As Fernandes urges, just because we critique the political economy of storytelling, we shouldn't dismiss the stories at the center of it. "We must also take seriously the stories themselves," she writes, "as representations of a life and as the public utterance of previously silenced experiences."

As is so often true, we'd be wise to heed the words of Audre Lorde:

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

That we fetishize attention and commodify stories aren't reasons to stay silent. We should tell our stories if so-called, but we must do so while interrogating how we've learned to tell them. After all, teaching commodified forms of storytelling and attention-getting strategies is big business, too.

Are we sharing to connect? Or are we sharing to attract attention? Are we hoping to reach out to those with similar stories? Or are we hoping to "get picked" and be rescued from precarity?

Without careful examination, stories can reinforce the status quo as much as the production of any commodity. The market will gladly package and sell our stories if we don't intervene.

But a story that connects, fortifies, and electrifies a community creates the potential for a new beginning.