#if i didn't have internet access i'm quite certain i'd shift back to the patterns i grew up with.
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aeide-thea · 2 years ago
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like, okay, to walk my own talk and do a little fact-checking—here’s a review of hari’s book stolen focus by uk psychologist and academic stuart ritchie, with whom i strongly suspect i've got some political bones to pick, published on unherd, a platform with which i know i’ve got some political bones to pick (tl;dr transphobia ahoy!), but ritchie’s approach and analysis here seem pretty reasonable:
[T]he phenomenon Hari addresses — the feeling that, with so many distractions around in the modern, online-centric world, it’s harder than ever to focus — is one many of us experience. Hari says that he and almost everyone around him feels this way, and describes a several-months-long “digital detox”, where he went to live in a small town on Cape Cod with no smartphone and no internet.
But that’s all anecdotal: does Hari actually present any evidence that shortening attention spans is a society-wide problem? […] It’s not until more than halfway through the book, page 176, that Hari drops what should be a bombshell: “We don’t have any long-term studies tracking changes in people’s ability to focus over time.” In other words, he quietly admits that there isn’t really any strong scientific evidence for the main thesis of the book.
more specifics are under the cut, for anyone who doesn’t feel like giving unherd more traffic (i’m right there with you!), but i do want to highlight the conclusion of the article, which is cutting but seems essentially correct to me:
[T]his is a writer who’s shown himself again and again to be either untrustworthy, unoriginal, or uninformed. If he’s right to say that our moments of focus are becoming ever-more precious, isn’t it time we started paying attention to someone — anyone — else?
and the further pullquotes i promised above:
Most of the book is dedicated to the causes of our collective attentional problems. The first is, unoriginally, social media. Isn’t it very revealing, Hari writes, that there’s no button on Facebook that you can press to help you meet up with your friends in person? Facebook won’t, he says, “alert you to the physical proximity of somebody you might want to see in the real world”. Hari explains that the whole business model of social media precludes the encouragement of joys like looking your friends in the eye or giving them a hug, and instead is based on keeping you fixated on your screen, scrolling endlessly, never leaving the house.
Except Facebook does have exactly the feature that Hari claims doesn’t (and couldn’t) exist. It’s called “Nearby Friends”. It gives you a little map of where your friends are physically at that moment (if they have opted in). It’s been available since 2014. A two-second Google search would have enlightened Hari. Maybe he wrote that part of the book while he was in internet-free isolation.
[…]
[M]any of the other causes Hari identifies are rehashings of previous pop-science and pop-psychology books: we aren’t sleeping enough (Why We Sleep); kids don’t play outdoors any more (Free Range Kids and The Coddling of the American Mind); we don’t eat the right foods (a million diet books). Of course, it’s not a crime to write a book that doesn’t provide any new information. But Hari’s irritating, breathless style turns every single fact he “discovers” into a startling revelation, every single expert he speaks to into the absolute best in the world. Hari’s research — a series of interviews for a pop-psychology book — becomes an intense, globetrotting journey of personal discovery. His mind is so often blown that it’s little wonder it has such difficulty in paying attention.
It’s not just that Hari thinks he’s discovered earth-shaking new information. (As Dean Burnett wrote of Lost Connections, Hari “repeatedly presents well-known concepts and ideas … as fringe concepts that he’s discovered through his own efforts”.) He also thinks he’s a hard-nosed scientific truth-seeker. At the start of the book, he solemnly assures us that: “I studied social and political sciences at Cambridge University, where I got a rigorous training in how to read the studies these scientists publish [and] how to assess the evidence they put forward”.
What makes this risible isn’t just that he’s touting his undergraduate degree as if it makes him an expert (a fairly substantial proportion of the population also have one). It’s that Stolen Focus exhibits no talent for assessing evidence. A few times there’s a small concession to a flaw in a study, or to the fact that scientists disagree on a point — but Hari fails to add any of the necessary uncertainty to his argument. After a cursory mention of the “other side,” he usually just blunders on regardless, assuming his argument is right.
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Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen by Johann Hari
#johann hari#stuart ritchie#attention span#anyway as i said before i get that we all FEEL more distractible#and i'm inclined to think that's true to some extent—certainly the more i read short-form tumblr posts#instead of longer-form articles or books#the less practice i'm getting at engaging with longer-form narratives#in much the same way that a great deal of close reading has made my eyes physically worse at focusing farther away#but like—i've always wanted constant stimulus.#when i was growing up i had my nose constantly in a book‚ even when i was walking down the street.#these days i scroll through my phone. it's the same impulse.#if i didn't have internet access i'm quite certain i'd shift back to the patterns i grew up with.#maybe those were better; maybe it's value-neutral.#i'm not convinced the golden age of long attention span was as real as people make out—some of us had adhd before we had internet!#i think people have always sought diversion—it used to be that you'd see people on the subway with their noses in newspapers#and i think that frankly the panic about attention span gets too general#in the sense that like—if something compelling is in front of me‚ i'll engage with it.#i can spend hours talking to a friend on the phone‚ or out riding my bike.#so really i think it's a question of like—in what areas do we find ourselves struggling with attention?#and then what are we doing to address that?#i do think that specifically my desire to engage with new long-form writing is lower than it was when i was a child#but i think that's a product of (a) having other things to read that take less activation energy#and (b) not being in e.g. english classes that are asking me to read non-genre fiction#which was‚ if i'm being honest‚ the impetus for most of my ~literary~ reading growing up#so like. i could join a book club. i could take a book to a coffee shop and leave my phone at home.#there are specific actions i could take to address this specific issue instead of just engaging in generalized overblown despair#but like. that isn't a Sexy Unified Theory. that doesn't sell or go viral.#but like. clearly i continue to be capable of focusing in on things like—the many words i've assembled in this post and its tags!#so i just think like. we need to define the scope of the issue better‚ and once we get specific‚ solutions start to present themselves.#but we have to believe that we're capable. which we're less likely to believe‚ if we're reading books about how Big Tech Fucked Us Up!
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