Tackling the “attention crisis”

Stolen Focus
Bloomsbury Publications
2022
340 pages

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Johann Hari’s book on the “attention crisis” in the modern world was prompted by his godson’s addiction to his screens and inability to focus and by the author’s own struggles with attention and distraction. 

Hari is a British-Swiss journalist who has previously written books on depression and the war on drugs and has given hugely popular TED talks on addiction and depression. He was involved around 2011 in a controversy about plagiarism and anonymous Wikipedia edits but he has acknowledged his ethical failures during that period. 

The author contends that, at an individual level, a life full of distractions is diminished – when we are unable to pay sustained attention, we cannot achieve the things we want to achieve. At a social level, such a life diminishes our collective capacity to understand and to respond to the problems of today, such as the climate question. Finally, he argues, if we understand what is happening in our world, we can begin to change it.

Hari reflects on the phenomenon of “flow”, where we are deeply engrossed in something, like an artist absorbed by his painting. He sees “flow” as a deeply fulfilling experience, in contrast to the fragmentation involved in constantly checking one’s phones and other devices. 

There is also a chapter on the importance of sleep and the problems caused by sleep deprivation and another on the “collapse of sustained reading”. In practice, the new media platforms tend to work against the effort involved in reading and to favour superficiality. Thus, Twitter seems to imply that the world can be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly and what matters most is whether people agree with, and applaud, one’s short, simple and speedy statements.  Facebook conveys the impression that your life exists to be displayed to other people and you should be aiming every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life. 

Hari maintains that the business model of Silicon Valley, where many global social media companies are based, involves dominating the attention span of the wider society – telling such companies not to distract people is like telling an oil company not to drill for oil!

The social media companies benefit financially when we maximise screen time. More engagement by us is good for them because it means more advertising aimed in our direction and more knowledge on their part of our interests and usage patterns. The more time we spend on our screens, the more money they make and the more data they gather about us.

For example, the Facebook “feed” draws on an algorithm or calculation based on our interests and usage and is designed to show us posts that will keep us looking at our screens. In my own case, when I turn on Facebook, I am often presented with an article from a publication that I enjoy and am therefore likely to want to read. 

As Hari notes, the Harvard academic, Shosana Zuboff, has coined the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe these companies that monitor everything that we do online and can therefore target advertising at us with extraordinary accuracy.

The book offers many suggestions aimed at helping the reader to combat addiction to social media. Hari lists some of his own  approaches in his conclusion, such as going off social media for six months of the year, in chunks of a few weeks at a time, or sticking to his daily walk.

Nevertheless, a key argument in the book is that our collapsing ability to pay attention is not just a matter of individual failure or lack of discipline, even if individuals can take steps to avoid addictive behaviour. Instead, he argues, social media sites are downgrading our collective ability to come together as a society to identify problems and resolve them. Collective solutions are therefore needed. 

Hari makes a case for new funding arrangements for social media, that is, replacing the current advertising model with a subscription-based approach or with a public service model like the BBC – and some platforms could develop into quasi-public services, even if this possibility might arouse fears of “Big Brother” control by the State. 

A recent article by Samuel James in the US publication, First Things, argued that social stigma needs to be applied to excessive use of social media and called for age-based restrictions – everyone now accepts that spending hours in front of the TV makes no sense and the same social disapproval should apply to hours spent on social media, particularly by the young. 

The issues covered in Johann Hari’s book are of wide interest as there is considerable concern internationally about how the major companies are using our personal data and about the global power of such companies. 

As someone who is not an expert on the digital world, I found this book to be a stimulating and well-researched piece of journalism on an important topic. It draws on over 200 interviews conducted across the world with scientists interested in the phenomenon of human attention and distraction, as well as in issues related to sleep and dreams, and with experts in social media like the former Google engineer, Tristan Harris. It offers a thoughtful analysis both of the problem of distraction in the modern world and of the commercial imperatives of the large social media companies, 

On the other hand, the book doesn’t offer an in-depth economic or geopolitical analysis of “Big Tech” (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) or detailed analysis of the budgets or economic strengths and weaknesses of these huge companies. 

The author might have placed Big Tech more firmly in the context of globalisation, of huge speculative investment in these companies after the financial crash of 2008 and of enormous, if declining, US economic and political power. The book is written from an Anglo-American perspective and there is no analysis of China’s huge importance in the digital world. 

Problems for democracy might also have been teased out more thoroughly. It seems quite wrong that decisions influencing the conduct of public debate in Ireland (or France or Spain) are being made in California.  

For example, the decision of Google to ban social media ads in May 2018 in the run-up to the Irish abortion referendum significantly benefited the pro-choice side of the argument, which was already receiving hugely positive coverage in mainstream media, and disadvantaged the pro-life side, which was not enjoying such coverage, and arguably constituted unwarranted interference by a private US company in an Irish referendum.

Journalistic analysts like Mr Hari tend to focus on the politically conservative risks attaching to social media (the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro, for example) but not to examine the progressive bias of the Big Tech companies, as manifested in the “de-platforming” of various conservative voices. 

Journalistic criticism of social media also tends to imply that mainstream media are scrupulously objective in their coverage of current issues. Yet media “groupthink” on issues such as abortion has undoubtedly fuelled the desire of ordinary citizens to bypass mainstream media in their communications. 

This thought-provoking book might have benefited from greater openness to the wisdom coming from faith. There is a brief reference to “mindfulness” but nothing on how a focused and non-distracted approach to life can be nourished by prayer and adoration. Hari engages with many interviewees and focuses on the perils of a distracted lifestyle but does not look into the Christian monastic tradition, which, for centuries, has nourished the lives of those seeking to take a step back from worldly distractions and interruptions. While writing the book, Hari spent three months in Provincetown on Cape Cod, without access to the Internet – a quasi-monastic retreat! – but an interview with a Cistercian or Benedictine monk might have enriched his reflections!