I am nearing the end of Stolen Focus, and it is full of things to think about.
One thing Hari writes about is the cost of distraction in terms of brainpower. The idea that distractions make us dumber is pretty familiar by now, but the degree of the diminishment is startling. He cites research that suggests we perform 20 to 30% worse if we're working around smartphone interruptions. He says, in fact, that you'd be better off working stoned than working while toggling between texts and Facebook and work tasks.
His most scathing chapters are focused on the companies that are profiting from our fractured attention. He says there are six ways that they are causing damage to our capacity to focus and think hard about complex issues, and I found the breakdown especially interesting. The first one is familiar: you don't have to read much about social media to know that the slow drip of likes and favorites and retweets affects our brains. I have to think anybody who uses social media has used it in that particularly frustrating way: did anyone like my joke? how many people liked my joke? is there more engagement now? now? Creating a desire for unpredictable rewards is straight out of the B.F. Skinner playbook.
This behavior fosters (#2) more frequent task-switching, which makes it harder to do the actually important parts of your job, and data mining means that the Big Tech folks have access to (#3) surprisingly specific information about how to worm their way into your unique brain and lure you back in. He quotes a former Google engineer who calls it attention fracking -- an apt metaphor given the way that these sites can poison the well.
The fourth mechanism is very familiar but I had wondered if it was just me. Does Twitter make me mad because I'm an easily angered person? No, says Hari. Twitter makes me mad because making people mad is profitable. It keeps them consuming your content -- and the fact that anger is terrible for focused attention is secondary. On a related note (#5), they give you the sense that you're immersed in an angry world, which tends to send people into a vigilant state. Vigilance (the need to attend to the world around you) is bad for sustained attention (the attempt to focus on the thing right in front of you, to the exclusion of other stimuli).
Hari is most concerned about the attention economy's effects on our collective attention (#6). "These sites," he says, "set society on fire." His section on the potential for Facebook and YouTube to enhance polarization and spread falsehoods rapidly is bleak and sobering. I don't want to believe it. And yet -- what is the proportion of Americans who believe the 2020 election was stolen? Hari says that if you are being fed a steady diet of nonsense and falsehood because it generates ad dollars, it becomes harder to know what is true and to think carefully about what is right.
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