Stolen Focus by Johann Hari: Social media, technology and why you can’t pay attention

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention

Author: Johann Hari

ISBN-13: 978-1526620224

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £20

A decade ago, when I interviewed the writer Nicholas Carr about his book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, he said a motivation for writing the then-controversial book was his growing realisation that he, a passionate lover of books, increasingly struggled to concentrate on any long-form piece of writing. “I really began to realise in a way that frustrated me that I really couldn’t sit down and read, not just a book but even a long article, with any degree of attention.”

Dismissed sceptically by many web-loving detractors as a misguided and unhip attempt to blame technology for his distraction, Carr’s book now impresses with foresight. Appropriately, he is namechecked as a pioneer in recognising our still-growing attention deficits by Johann Hari in this fresh and well-evidenced exploration of what Hari deftly describes as our collective “mental jet lag”.

We all know the feeling. In our TL/DR (too long/didn’t read) world (or even more worryingly, that of our children), we jitter across social media and news sites, rarely pick up a book, scroll addictively for some fleeting news snippet, mediate live events through the camera view on our phone screens, crave the ping of a new message and the validation of likes, followers, smiley faces or hearts.

Stressed out

Hari notes that 57 per cent of Americans do not read a single book in the span of a year. People spend more than five hours a day on their phones. Our love for devices produces an appalling statistic: one in five vehicle accidents is caused by a driver distracted by technology. Stressed out, bathed in the blue light glow of screens, we are getting less sleep. We are interrupted at work on average every three minutes. And in the US and increasingly elsewhere, we are seeing a deluge of children diagnosed with ADHD, an inability to pay attention, which is seeing a significant proportion medicated for years with stimulants.

Yet we persuade ourselves that we are thriving in a fulfilling, multitasking world, drinking copiously from an endless internet firehose of knowledge. But, as one eminent neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tells Hari, the size and capacity of the human brain hasn’t changed in 40,000 years and, Hari says, “isn’t going to upgrade any time soon”.

Carr was oh so right in 2010 – studies affirm that technology is definitely part of this problem, and Hari delves into many of them. By now, we all know how addictiveness is built into devices and apps, into social media, video channels and online shopping, and how algorithms rule, deciding in their opaque, advertising-driven way what momentary tidbit to feed us next.

Or maybe we don’t, a point that is especially important if we only feel vague discontent, yet want change. When Hari asked relatives and friends if they knew about how algorithms constantly shape our experience on Facebook or Twitter, YouTube or Tik Tok, he found they really had no idea.

He notes that collectively we must work to understand this problem better because change means tackling the formidable might of huge corporations wedded to a business model, dubbed “surveillance capitalism” by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff  in her own important but cognitively dense book of that title.

Most of Hari’s book focuses on technology’s contribution to “fracking our attention”, with two especially strong central chapters on the relentless growth of technologies “that can track and manipulate you” – the essence of surveillance capitalism. Some of the creators of those technologies, including the man who coded the “endless scroll” (the reason you no longer have to click to the next page of a site but instead it unfurls ceaselessly below as you scroll), provide insight into the Silicon Valley mindset behind the big platforms and sites that idolise monetisable user “engagement”.

Dystopian blockbusters

In one alarming, if amusing, anecdote, pioneering Valley engineer Jaron Lanier tells Hari that he used to work as a consultant for numerous Hollywood dystopian blockbusters, including Minority Report, “but he had to stop because he kept designing ever-more-frightening technologies to warn people of what was coming – and designers kept responding by saying: that’s so cool; how do we make that?”

The last pair of chapters veer off somewhat to discuss children, ADHD and the impacts of altered diets, school structure and paranoid restrictions on play. Important topics, but the chapters felt like detours. However, like the rest of the book, they were compelling reads that quickly (and appropriately) had my attention.

Hari serves up complicated topics in an accessible, personal, journalistic style that revolves around interviews, not heavy scholarship. The book draws on the insights of a dizzying collection of experts – computer scientists, psychologists, educationalists, childhood authorities, neuroscientists, social scientists. But he manages to adeptly present their ideas in a compact way that smoothly conveys key ideas, though sometimes this method gets a bit too TED Talky (yes, Hari has done TED Talks). Complexities are reduced to three summary points here, six there. At moments, you can visualise the stage presentation and slides.

Rightly, Hari rejects the industry-sympathetic arguments that we are the problem, that if we only had more self-control and spent less time scrolling, emailing and clicking, we could fix ourselves. Instead, he ends with tentative suggestions on how people might begin to join together to form movements – an Attention Rebellion, he offers – which could force the more comprehensive, systemic change needed to halt the descent into distraction that, unfortunately, also makes it much harder to think clearly and focus on solutions.

In its amiable accessibility and its earnest offer of a basic plan for counteraction, Stolen Focus is a perfect companion (or alternative) volume to Zuboff’s more intimidating and academic Surveillance Capitalism. And it certainly attracts, well, attention. Reading the title of the book as it lay on my lap at a vaccination centre, the woman giving me my jab was intrigued and wanted to know more.

“Oh, that’s just the book for me,” she exclaimed. And it is.