Book Review - Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again - Johann Hari
I quit Facebook about eight years ago, back in 2015. I had a number of issues with it, but one thing that concerned me was how long I spent just scrolling. Sure, there was the odd post or comment, but I just seemed to spend most of my time mindlessly just scrolling down the page, which was endless and filled with the minutiae of people’s lives, many of whom were strangers to me. I could do this for an hour and not notice time passing.
This is known as the ‘infinite scroll’ and was invented by Aza Raskin, who now feels bad about it. He believed it was a good design, and increased the site’s speed and efficiency. He now sees that, along with sites such as twitter, the infinite scroll makes you spend 50% more time on social media. In ‘Stolen Focus’ we learn that he thought that tech advances would help ‘change the world’ and lead to social progress in many fields. He now ‘feels sort of dirty,’ as increased social media use has lead to people becoming angrier, less empathetic and spending less time tackling social issues, weakening social and familial bonds.
Silicon Valley
This is one of the many fascinating conversations that Johann Hari has in ‘Stolen focus’ with some of the leading names from Silicon Valley, as well as over 200 of the top scientists and researchers looking at attention and focus. Of course, it’s not a total shock when you realise that the aim of the social media companies is to get you to spend more and more time on their sites, and to hell with societal or personal consequences, as we have now seen.
“One day, James Williams--the former Google strategist I met--addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: "How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?" There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.”
I had to read parts of ‘Stolen focus’ in small snippets, because my own attention span has taken a beating over the years. It used to be that I could read for an hour and not even notice the passing of time. Mornings, afternoons or evenings could disappear before I’d look at a clock, lost in an author’s imagination. Now, I do well to read one or two pages before I have to stop and check on something. Talking to people, I know I’m not alone in this, though I think it’s too easy to just blame lockdowns, as many people have said to me. I think the rot had begun to set in well before it - the period during covid just allowed social media companies to tighten their grip on our attention.
Reading
There are too many depressing statistic to choose from in ‘Stolen Focus’. As someone who has a book blog, it makes grim reading to learn that currently, recreational reading is at lowest ever recorded and between 2004 and 2017, the number of men who read for pleasure dropped by 40%, women by 29%. And 57% of Americans don’t read a single book in a year.
Anyone still out there? Sometimes I feel like I’m in a wardrobe talking to myself on this blog so those statistics make sense. Only yesterday as I was chatting to my barber, she mentioned that she read books in the evening, and when I told her I did too it was like we were both realised we had a shared passion for speaking a rare mountainous dialect of Urdu. It’s odd that it feels like a nice surprise when someone admits to also being a reader.
I had pre-ordered the paperback of ’Stolen Focus’ some months ago, as I knew if there was someone able to investigate and then present on the topic of focus and concentration in an engrossing and readable style, it was this author. ‘Lost connections’ by Johann Hari was one of my favourite books of last year, telling me more about depression and loneliness than nearly any other book I have ever read on the subject in a long time. It was the way he laid out his research, and how it related to modern living, that really spoke to me. ‘Life changing’ is a phrase we throw around too easily, but ‘Lost connections’ really had a huge impact on me. Sometimes you forget that books still have the potential to do that.
‘Stolen Focus’ begins by discussing how scientists have tracked just how much our attention span has shrunk. The problem is that we have too much access to too much information all at once. What path are we on? One of the scientist felt that we will end up with two classes of people - those aware of the risks and find ways to live within their limits, and those who don’t, who will live more and more ‘inside their computers.’ You only have to look around at people starting at their phones, the rise of virtual rituality and people who spend all their time online, to see what he means. One of the big questions we have to ask ourselves is - how to use social media less?
Is willpower enough? Of course it can play a part, but not on its own - Ray Baumeister, author of a book called ‘Willpower’ talks about how even his concentration is split.
Humans have negativity bias. You can have a simple feature on Facebook alerting people when all of your friends had gathered in one area. But that’s bad for engagement. Social media companies aren’t interested in right or wrong- just keeping you on the feed. They decide the algorithm, and the post that you will read. Things that make people angry mean more engagement. So these companies are largely responsible for the current poisonous social discourse.
It’s not so much the phone itself - it’s the way the apps have been designed to grab and hold our attention. Nothing in this you probably didn’t already know, but when you hear some of the leading minds in Silicon Valley talking about how technology has been designed to corrode our attention, to steal it - I found it infuriating. Companies could decide otherwise, and developed technology and apps that sustain our attention, to help us achieve deeper and mores sustaining goals - but why would the technology companies want to do that?
Social Media Limits
Facebook, for example, could ask you to specify how long you wanted to spend on the site, then issue an alert or even freeze you out of your account when you’d reached a certain limit. It could ask you about your interests, long terms goals and base your feed around those. But they don’t - Your attention is a commodity being sold to the highest bidder.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
There’s a chapter on children which I found to be incredibly disturbing. Whereas in previous generations children roamed free and played, learning valuable skills, especially social skills, and developing creativity. If children appear jaded and unfocused now, is it any wonder - they’re confined to their homes, staring at screens. A lot of the food they eat contains additives that makes them hyper, and the school system leaves them bored by learning. I found this to be one of the most worrying chapters.
Johann Hari details his own efforts to detoxify from social media, and highlights just how difficult it is. There aren’t any easy solutions on how to use social less less. Because our collective attention has been damaged, it’s difficult for us to come together as a society and find solutions. There have been movements before - environmentalism, civil rights movements etc - but if we are so angry with each other and polarised, how we can ever bring about social change?
“You don’t get what you don’t fight for.”
A lot of it is also not our fault. The book also details how we are surrounded by pollutants which also effect our brains and attention spans. We live in a world where we give our pets antipsychotic medication.
We need to find a way of making these technologies work for us, that help our focus. Our world is facing issues such as environmental collapse, so we could do with as much focus as we can muster.
“I don't think it's a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can't focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions--and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can't get a handle on any of them.”
A Change Has Gotta Come
One of the things I like about ‘Lost connections’ were the suggestions that Johann Hari made for reducing our loneliness. Here, it’s more difficult. For there to be any real change will depend on society reaching agreement that firstly, there is a problem and change is needed. How to use social media less is something we all have to tackle individually: we can put the phone down and restrict our time on social media using apps that limit your access. Go for a walk, let your mind wander, and immerse yourself in the things you like, acheiving a flow state. I felt a bit disheartened after this book, I have to admit. But change starts with the individual and hey, I’m still not using Facebook! I’ve also taken to putting my phone in the other room and muting the notifications on my watch. I also put an hour slot aside for reading in the evenings and nothing else. I continue to meditate. Small steps.
I found this book fascinating, impeccably researched and very readable. Johann Hari has has a great ability to take complicated issues and present them in an engaging way. ‘Stolen focus’ also made me angry and a bit depressed, but there’s enough optimism in the book to make me believe that we can, if we put our phones down, start to fight back and reclaim our attention from those who have stolen it.
Book review - Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and how to think deeply again by Johann Hari
Published January 6, 2022 by Bloomsbury UK
352 pages, Paperback