It helps to focus when you are reviewing a book — especially a book about how we seem to have lost focus, the ability to concentrate, to extract ourselves from the magnetic lure of our smartphones, tablets and computers.
Not initially realising the irony, I read a Kindle edition of this book — on my iPad. I was to learn of “screen inferiority”, how we concentrate less and absorb less from our time on the screen — as opposed to when we read the old-tech, page-turning printed version.
I read several pages at a time, making notes, selecting quotations, enjoying the flow of the writing. But every now and then, I would pause to check Facebook and Twitter, and my emails.
This book is as much about me as it is about anyone else. But unlike Hari, I do not have the resources nor the willpower to do a full digital detox. He did just this, escaping for three months to a beach house in Provincetown, New England — with a very low-tech phone able only to send and receive calls.
This book is as much about me as it is about anyone else. But unlike Hari, I do not have the resources nor the willpower to do a full digital detox.
Before long, he was thinking more clearly, focusing better, able to read for hours or to take long walks. He was free at last.
This exhaustively researched and fascinating book explores the many dimensions of focus and how the modern world is hacking away at it.
It is done with honesty. The problem is complex, the scientists are divided over it and there are no magic wands.
“But this is not a self-help book, and what I have to say to you is more complex, and it means starting with an admission: I have not entirely solved this problem in myself. In fact, at this moment, as I write this in lockdown, my attention has never been worse,” Hari writes.
“Provincetown had liberated my focus and attention; the Covid-19 crisis brought it lower than it had ever been.”
There is a wealth of interesting info — for instance, on how the electronic noise, the constant texting and message-checking, can have much the same effect on your concentration as too much alcohol or weed.
“In terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot,” we are told.
As we become less focused, we read less. Something that should be an alarm bell for all of us who regard it as one of life’s great treats and blessings.
“The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57% of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent 17 minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone,” Hari warns
He has discovered something he describes as “the flow” — an ability to achieve deep concentration and to derive the benefits that, well, er, flow from it.
“We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow,” he suggests.
He also looked at the effects of sleep deprivation, and of Twitter and Facebook — the latter with its “hollow parodies of friendship”. How brilliantly astute!
For the big tech firms, “their business model can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society”, he writes, before suggesting of Facebook: “The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen. That’s it.
“Remember: the more time you look, the more money they make. So the algorithm is always weighted towards figuring out what will keep you looking, and pumping more and more of that on to your screen to keep you from putting down your phone. It is designed to distract.”
More worrying, Facebook’s own scientists “concluded there was one solution: they said Facebook would have to abandon its current business model. Because their growth was so tied up with toxic outcomes, the company should abandon attempts at growth. The only way out was for the company to adopt a strategy that was ‘anti-growth’ — deliberately shrink and choose to be a less wealthy company that wasn’t wrecking the world”.
Facebook ignored this advice — and closed down the unit that had come up with it.
In terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.
— Johann Hari
“If we are going to overcome this process of becoming hooked to our apps and devices, we have to develop individual skills to resist the part inside all of us that succumbs to these distractions,” we are told.
Other causes for poor attention spans are explored, including poor diet, sleep deprivation and pollution.
Hari advocates the ability to escape harassment from the office in our leisure time: “But since our work lives came to be dominated by email, there’s a growing expectation that workers will respond at any time, day or night. One study found that a third of French professionals felt they could never unplug, for fear of missing out on an email they were expected to reply to.”
However, he notes that many studies show that the move to a four-day week can actually boost productivity: “(In one of these) all signs of distraction, they found, were radically down. For example, the time people spent on social media at work — which was measured by monitoring their computers — fell by 35%.
“At the same time, levels of engagement, teamwork and stimulation at work — some of which were measured by observing the workers, and some by how the workers described themselves — went up by between 30% and 40%. Stress levels were down by 15%. People told me they slept more, rested more, read more, relaxed more.
“Many of us have built our identities around working to the point of exhaustion. We call this success. In a culture built on ever-increasing speed, slowing down is hard, and most of us will feel guilty about doing it. That’s one reason it’s important we all do it together — as a societal, structural change,” he argues.
A long section on attention deficit disorder in children was interesting in its own right — suggesting that these days we keep our children prisoner, whereas in the past they were far freer to wander, to play, to explore. Where once kids roamed free, they are now “effectively under house arrest”.
He concludes that it is worth campaigning against the forces that are sapping our powers of concentration.
“One thing was now very clear to me. If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked; who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash; who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day — then, yes, we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems,” he writes.
There have been many other books on this topic, and certainly, it merits much wider debate and discussion.
After reading it, I decided to go for a coffee, on my own, to leave my cellphone untouched and to watch the world go by. It was a rediscovered pleasure I am determined to repeat.
I may not be able to, but I plan to stare at my electronic devices less, to read more, to slow down, to think more, to enable me to better focus. In small, but hopefully permanent, ways, this book may have changed my life for the better. For which I am very grateful.
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