We have lost attention. It costs us more – much more – to concentrate on tasks that require it. In 2010, American writer Nicholas Carr published the bestseller Shallow: What Is the Internet Doing to Our Minds? (Taurus), a book that arose from the confirmation of the author and some of his friends that they had lost the ability to concentrate for things like reading a novel of the dimensions of War and Peace, by Lev Tolstoy. For years we have assumed that the technology and development of mobile screens is the main, if not the only, cause of this loss of dedication, but the journalist Johann Hari has investigated all over the world and has found many more, which he explains in The value of attention (Peninsula), a book recommended by characters like Naomi Klein, Oprah Winfrey or Hillary Clinton.
Like Carr thirteen years before, Hari was aware that his ability to concentrate was gone. Unlike the first, he wrote his book only three years after the launch of the first iPhone and when social networks had not reached the degree of development and intrusion into the lives of many people that they have today. So he devised a radical first action. Hari decided to leave his iPhone with a friend, buy a mobile phone without any data connection (it wasn't easy for him) and embarked on a three-month digital cure living in a rented house facing the sea in a small town called Provincetown.
The experiment gave results. He discovered numerous things. Living according to the rhythm of the sun allowed him to go back to sleeping eight to nine hours, like he did when he was a child, and wake up fully rested. Sleep is essential in care, as several specialists explained to him. One of them, the Dutch psychiatrist Sandra Kooij, affirms: “when we sleep better, many problems are less so... like mood disorders, like obesity, like concentration problems... Sleep repairs a lot of damage ”.
One of the things that changed in Hari's mind during his digital retreat was the ability to delve into texts or the discovery that wandering, which caused him stress in other situations, suited him well when he lived in isolation. The journalist contrasts all these sensations with interviews with experts from around the world.
Upon his return from his three-month escape, Hari recovered in a few days the same sensations he suffered before his digital exile. James Williams, a former Google strategist and professor at the University of Oxford, gave him the clue: “To see the solution as coming primarily through individual people practicing abstinence is simply 'throwing the ball into the court's court'. individual' when in reality it is the environmental changes that will truly make the difference”.
One of the testimonials of The Value of Attention is Tristan Harris, one of the main characters in the famous Netflix documentary The Dilemma of the Networks, who discovers the way in which social networks manipulate the interaction of their users. In 2002, at Stanford University, Harris took a course in the Persuasive Technologies Lab. “It was a place where scientists were looking for ways to design technologies that could change our behavior without us even knowing it was being changed,” he explains. It was all based on the behavioral psychology theories of B.F. Skinner.
Harris came to work at Google, on the Gmail team, where he was concerned about the app's ability to distract people. "All human beings have natural vulnerabilities, and instead of exploiting those vulnerabilities, like an evil magician, Google should respect them," he said in a presentation to his co-workers.
The search engine company controls more than 50% of all notifications from all phones in the world, which is why it saw "an arms race that leads companies to find more reasons to steal people's time." His comments caused quite a stir on Google. Still, he was offered a position as Google's first “ethical designer,” though Harris ended up finding that his proposals to make his company's products less disruptive to people had a negative effect on the bottom line. And they asked for explanations for it. He ended up leaving, of course.
In the book appears Aza Raskin, the engineer who invented the infinite scroll, that characteristic by which in a social network like Facebook or Twitter, as the user moves the page, new content is loaded that can capture their interest in a list endless. Worried at 32, Raskin calculated how much time his invention was wasting people. He calculated that some 200,000 human lives, from birth to life, are lost each day because of this.
To that extent, everything in The Value of Attention points to technology as the cause of ills. The mobile with a screen whose era the iPhone inaugurated is only a tool, but misusing it can be harmful to people. Johann Hari discovers more causes. One of them is the so-called cruel optimism. It is a trend that focuses on the individual. It tells a person that they can disengage from social networks individually, depending on their will, instead of modifying them so that they do not focus on being addictive. Or it is explained to someone that losing weight is only a matter of their will, even if the environment and the rhythm of life lead them to consume processed foods, instead of making healthy eating the only one within their reach.
In the first glimpse of a deep solution, Hari is in favor of modifying the networks, with the elimination of the infinite scroll or the grouping of notifications, for example, once a day. There are those who propose that they be intervened by the public powers in the same way that we assume that the sewerage network is public for sanitary reasons. With the networks there are mental health reasons for the population. Hari also explores stress. In a 2020 survey of people in the US and UK who felt their care was getting worse, the top cause cited was stress (48%); the second were changes in their life circumstances –such as having a child or getting old– (48%); the third were sleeping problems (43%); and the telephone appeared in fourth position (37%).
The book addresses the way in which diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have skyrocketed in children and talks with experts about its possible causes: from feeding to confinement and isolation of children, which in Western societies They no longer play away from adult supervision.
The most complicated thing in the book is the search for a solution. This happens, according to Hari, due to an awareness that we are facing a great social problem. For this, above all, it must be made visible. From there, a kind of social rebellion must take place that achieves some of the changes necessary to recover the lost attention. A quote from James Williams sums it up: “The liberation of human attention could be the defining moral and political battle of our time. Its success is the precondition for the triumph of practically all other struggles”.
