Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Chapter 12-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Addictive Nature of Technology

For Johann Hari, people’s increasing attention deficits are partly to blame on the habit-forming design of many websites, particularly social media. Hari interviews several web engineers and reveals that their understanding of human psychology is as essential to their work as their knowledge of coding. This has allowed developers to exploit vulnerabilities in the human psyche to make sites as addictive as possible, coaxing users to spend more and more time online.

Tristan Harris’s computer science education at Stanford included classes that taught him the “psychological insights and tricks that had been discovered about how to change human beings and to get them to do what you want” (109). When Harris was developing Instagram, he included immediate reinforcements in the app, inspired by B.F. Skinner’s studies about using positive reinforcement to program behavior. Indeed, Harris and his classmates implemented psychological “insights and tricks” so successfully in their web designs that they nicknamed Professor B.J. Fogg, a Stanford behavioral scientist, “the millionaire maker” (110). Tech designer Nir Eyal showcased similar strategies in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which was aimed at fellow web designers. In his work, Eyal encourages developers to use “mind manipulation” to target users with content that will soothe “internal triggers” (148) and make checking the app a habit.

Hari also reflects on his own dependence on his devices and social media. During his three-month digital detox, he was distressed at being apart from his devices, even though he had no need for them. Indeed, he often worried about possibly being separated from his phone forever—a paranoia that gave him insight into the level of fixation he had developed: “I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling—the addicted person’s craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness” (48). Hari’s account of his godson’s phone use paints a similarly sad picture of addiction to technology: “‘I know something’s wrong,’ Adam said to me softly, holding his phone tightly in his hand. ‘But I have no idea how to fix it.’ Then he went back to texting” (8). Hari highlights this feeling of helplessness, arguing that frequent use of social media is not always a conscious choice, but often a powerfully addictive habit.

The Individual and Societal Consequences of Distraction

Hari argues that being distracted is not a merely a personal dilemma, but is rather detrimental to the health and productivity of society as a whole.

Hari describes several ways that distraction affects us on an individual level. His godson’s constant distractibility took a toll on his social skills: “He struggled to stay with a topic of conversation for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or abruptly switching to another topic” (4). Hari laments that his godson missed out on in-person connection by continually checking his phone. Losing his travel companion to his device made Hari feel lonely, even though they were physically together: “I felt as alone as if I had been standing in an empty Iowa cornfield, miles from another human” (7).

Another individual consequence to poor focus is failing to absorb information and commit it to memory. Inattention hampers learning, recall of stored knowledge, and the ability to make connections. This makes distraction and multitasking—something devices encourage users to do—anathema to cognition: “[T]here’s no alternative, if you want to do things well, to focusing carefully on one thing at a time” (42). When people frequently switch attention between tasks, they are less able to retain information because their brains are overloaded. One study found that students who received texts while completing a task performed 20% worse than those whose work was uninterrupted.

Distractibility is having societal consequences, too. Hari considers empathy to be “one of the most complex forms of attention we have—and the most precious” (88). Media that prioritize engagement by serving increasingly outrage-provoking and extreme content limit and decrease overall levels of empathy. Tech engineer Aza Raskin agrees: “[P]eople become more unempathetic, angry, and hostile as their social-media use went up” (121). Since “empathy makes progress possible” (88), its lack could stall societal progress.

Building on this idea, Hari argues that attention deficits will make it difficult for people to collaborate on solving difficult, long-term problems. This includes experts tasked with inventing solutions, and ordinary people who must stay politically engaged to drive positive change. A healthy ability to focus is an essential part of the democratic process, since citizens must pay attention to evaluate issues, lobby for results, and evaluate politicians’ performance; however, 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” (14). Hari worries that being highly distractible will cause people to be more susceptible to “simplistic authoritarian solutions” (14) and less insightful about identifying real solutions.

The Need for Collective Action

Hari makes the case that diminishing attention spans can only be fully solved with collective action. Personal choices can mitigate the damage of certain activities. Hari is “strongly in favor of individuals making the changes they can in their personal lives” (270): deleting social media apps, spending less time on their phones, eating better foods, and sleeping more. However, Hari is quick to point out the limitations of leaving everything to personal responsibility; to truly reclaim one’s focus, one must take on the various systemic forces that threaten it.

Hari highlights large, society-wide factors contributing to lost focus that lifestyle changes cannot alleviate. For instance, air pollution is proven to damage brain health. Similarly, many chemical additives in foods, materials, and cosmetics are known to interfere with normal brain and body function. However, “trying to personally avoid pollutants today, at an individual level, is largely a fool’s errand” (211). Historically, people have successfully campaigned to eliminate certain air pollutants, such as lead; Hari believes that we must continue to press legislators to reform the use of various toxins, creating a “new approach” (211) to manage the chemicals and pollution that threaten brain health. This approach must address the systemic issue at the heart of this problem. In the current model, industries can introduce any chemical into products without first testing its safety. Public health expert Bruce Lanphear argues that this has been disastrous for human health. Instead, scientists who are not funded by industry should rigorously test chemicals already in use and those proposed to be included in products.

The addictive nature of social media is also difficult to resist as an individual, especially since its usage has permeated people’s personal and professional lives. Big Tech tends to emphasize individual discipline to shirk being held accountable for intentionally designing their products to be habit-forming. These companies “can no longer deny the crisis, so they’re doing something else: subtly urging us to see it as an individual problem that has to be solved with greater self-restraint on my part and yours, not theirs” (147). However, collective action could transform the way social media functions. For instance, activism could result in a ban on “surveillance capitalism” (the collection and sale of data for advertisements) or in social media generating revenue through subscriptions rather than advertisements.

Engaging in activist movements takes a certain kind of attention that Hari calls “stadium lights”—an attention that allows people to “work together to formulate and fight for collective goals” (267). Hari argues that channeling this attention is the only way to truly solve problems such as air pollution, chemical toxicity, and the addictiveness of social media. He urges readers to “organize and fight back—to take on the forces that are setting fire to our attention and to replace them with forces that will help us to heal” (273). While this may feel daunting at first, it is not naive to band together and expect results. Instead, “[i]t’s naive to think we as citizens can do nothing, and leave the powerful to do whatever they want, and somehow our attention will survive” (277).