Stolen Focus

Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but in the long-term, nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings--and learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

In the U.S., teenagers now focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds on average, and office workers manage only three minutes. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades--leaving us uniquely vulnerable, when social media arrived, to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. These forces have been so successful that our collapse in attention is behind many of the wider problems society faces.

Author: Johann Hari

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Released Date: 2023

ISBN: 9781526620217