Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)
Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In Moscow, the former Google engineer James Williams – who has become the most important philosopher of attention in the western world – told me I had made a crucial mistake.
It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society.
Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”.
We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model, which is specifically designed to invade our attention in order to keep us scrolling.
Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky.
We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris told me – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever.
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Interestingly enough, just yesterday I finished the (audio)book that this excerpt is from: Stolen Focus. It’s a good read and it really resonated with me.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. I’ve struggled with focus my whole life but had managed well enough to finish school and get established in a career. But even with treatment, it’s been getting harder and harder over the years to stay focused on anything - whether it’s work or hobbies that I enjoy.
It occurred to me after reading Stolen Focus that my struggles really started getting worse around the time I got my first smart phone. Over the years, more and more I’ve found myself reaching for my phone out of habit to fill time, even when I’m doing other things like watching tv. The timing may just be a coincidence, but I thought it was interesting. The book has definitely caused me to reevaluate my phone and social media usage (I say as I post on lemmy while watching the office).
