Book Review: Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Johann Hari's first two books. Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections, focused respectively on drug addiction/prohibition and on the widespread phenomenon of depression/anxiety and problems evident in how we diagnose and treat it. In his third book, Stolen Focus, the issue he explores is our increasing difficulty in achieving the sustained focus and deep thinking we need to address both individual and social problems. As Hari notes, the most frequently cited source of the nonstop, detrimental distraction many of us experience daily is the pervasive networked technology that consumes so much of our time. But Hari's book probes the issue far beyond technology and argues the sources of distraction can be found in other crucial aspects of our presents forms of social organization.

Hari begins the book with an account of a personal attempt to disconnect from networked technology and distraction, describing a three-month sojourn he took to Provincetown, Massachusetts. During this personal retreat he experimented in living without a networked computer or phone while deliberately attempting to engage in activities that promoted focused attention and undisturbed thinking and reflection, such as reading novels and taking long walks. He recognizes the benefits that doing this brings, as his head clears and he finds his focus improving, but he also readily concedes that such an experiment is not something that can be done by many people on a large scale and in any case it wouldn't begin to address the modern social structures, institutions, and beliefs that have created and maintain the problem. The rest of the book attempts to identify these sources and potential ways to tackle them.

Following a pattern established in his previous books, Hari devotes substantial sections of Stolen Focus to interviews with experts in various subject areas and the findings of scientific research related to the issues he covers. These topics include the specific processes of distraction (called "switching," in which our attention shifts to a different object, and the substantial time and effort required to refocus back on one's original task); the various ways networked technologies are deliberately designed to maintain our attention through an onslaught of images and messages, and the continuous surveillance these technologies also impose to refine corporations' profitable goal of keeping us glued to screens; the sharp decline of sustained and recreational reading, particularly of fiction, and the negative impacts following from this; the beneficial effects of "mind-wandering" and the misinformed ways in which this activity is denigrated in our culture; and the impacts of stress, poor diets, pollution, the sharp curtailment of children's freedom to play on their own for lengthy periods of time; and the explosion of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and the ill-advised use of drugs to address it. Hari is scrupulous in identifying areas where there are disagreements within the scientific community about these issues, but the overall case he makes is compelling.

And what is Hari's argument? In the course of his three books, despite their ostensibly different subject matter, Hari has been carefully documenting and describing different aspects of a single phenomenon: the devastating human toll taken by late capitalism in its neoliberal phase. The social maladies of drug addiction, depression, anxiety, and a crippling inability to focus our attention in a world saturated by profit-driven "surveillance capitalism" (as he calls it here) are all symptomatic of the adverse impact of an institutional order utterly out of sync with well-established human propensities that evolved over thousands of years. How we grow, how we learn, our relationships with nature and with each other, the importance of our intrinsic interests to our health and well-being, the way we prefer to allocate time, our desire for social connection rather than alienation - all of these things are under siege in a capitalist order that is driven by an impossible, unsustainable drive for endless economic growth and the intensified subordination of real human needs to the needs of profit.

In each of his books, Hari has increasingly devoted more analysis and space to the need for organized social movements to challenge the prerogatives of this system. As he notes in chapter seven, the typical advice we get when we seek to combat distraction is to seek individual solutions, which Hari characterizes as "cruel optimism" both because such solutions often demand material resources not available to working class people and because it is cruel to insist that social problems can only be met with individual solutions when this is false. In his concluding chapter, "Attention Rebellion," Hari makes one of his strongest argument yet that only large-scale social movements can address the challenges we face today. The process of organizing is itself part of the healing process that can help people win back the attention and focus we all need to meet the issue of climate change and restore a world better attuned to our real needs as human beings.

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