When British science journalist Johann Hari finds that he has spent three hours reading the same first pages of a novel over and over again, but the distracting pinging of his phone keeps him from making progress, alarm bells go off. Has his attention, his ability to concentrate due to his years of screen addiction, now finally been destroyed? He decides to test it out with a three-month digital detox on a peninsula off the coast of Boston. Books, an internet-free telephone and laptop are the main companions. His intended goal is to write a novel undisturbed.
After the agreed three months, he returns home as a purified and above all relieved person: ‘I had been so afraid that my brain was broken and that my experiment would show that I had become a permanently degenerated blob of flesh. Now I saw that recovery is really possible.’ It turns out to be a temporary recovery. With his return to the Internet, all the good intentions of moderation evaporate and he is back to square one within four months.
Does Hari have such lousy self-control or is there more to it? This question underlies his latest book, Lost attention, and the outcome is predetermined: there is more to it. The original title of the book, Stolen Focus, says it more forcefully: our attention is not simply lost, it is stolen. Deliberately. By the creators of internet services like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest, all of which are based on hijacking your attention for as long as possible so that you see the ads that generate the revenue. And they do that by making you check your phone with constant beeps (there’s news!), introducing likes and hearts that hit the bull’s eye on our addiction susceptibility, and making suggestions for scrolling through messages, offers or videos that carefully respond to your (nicked) profile.
self-control
So far nothing new. What Hari is mainly about is: whose problem is this? Yours and your self-control? Or from the creators of the internet services? Without completely denying the individual’s own responsibility, he nevertheless points in the first place to the inventors and their destructive revenue model. He thus follows the cynical observation of former Google programmer Tristan Harris, inspired by experience: ‘You can try to show self-control, but on the other side of your screen there are a thousand developers who work against you.’
Hari interviewed dozens of experts for his book: in addition to Harris and other rebellious tech designers, he also included social scientists, concerned parents, and specialists in sleep, child psychiatry, nutrition, and biology. In a swirling and entertaining interweaving of research data, anecdotes and his own experiences, he argues that our attention span is demonstrably crumbling.
He points to more culprits, such as lack of sleep, the constant stress of having to keep all the balls in the air, and the lack of play space for children (which he sees as the reason for the increase in the number of ADD diagnoses). But the core of his argument is the manipulation of internet services to hold our attention for economic reasons.
He also has a solution: we, the users, have to join forces on the barricades to challenge the revenue model of these services. Why not a subscription model where the users of Facebook, for example, pay and are therefore the customer who is king? Eliminate distraction from commercials, beeps and unwanted suggestions.
Confident and intuitive
Hari is in Lost attention, as in his earlier bestsellers on drugs and depression and in high-profile Ted Talks, a man of the all-encompassing story with firm ideas and statements, often leaning on a very shaky and selectively composed edifice of evidence. This means that his starting point – our attention span has fallen into free fall – remains largely intuitive and stimulates you to both self-examination and contradiction.
There is nothing wrong with a subscription model. No one wants to see their private information collected and traded unsolicited. But would it also effectively rip our attention away from the phone? Would people be less likely to check Twitter if they weren’t alarmed by beeps, surf the web less, check the news about Ukraine, plan vacations online, play games? Who knows (according to statistics, the average American touches their phone 2,617 times in 24 hours). But the Internet remains an attractive attention grabber, even without beeps, thanks to its enormous range. Contrary to Hari’s claim, if we are afraid that it will damage our attention, it is mainly a problem of ourselves and our self-control.
Johann Hari: Lost Attention – Why We Can’t Concentrate Anymore. Translated from English by Marga Blankestijn. Nijgh & Van Ditmar; 368 pages; € 24.99.
