Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

Over the last few decades, personal computing devices and the media they can access have reshaped how people live and work. The author finds that his personal and professional life is so dominated by his laptop and his cell phone that he goes on a three-month digital detox to confront the issue.

The first cell phones were sold in the 1970s, though it took several decades for them to become affordable for most consumers. This development was followed by the internet, which was invented in the early 1980s and popularized by the mid 1990s. This decade also saw the invention of the first internet-connected laptops and cell phones. Soon after, cell phone design evolved to include touch screens and the ability to navigate an ever-growing range of internet sites. Social media sites MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook (which now dominates social media with three billion users around the world), invented in the early 2000s, gave users a place to connect with others online, share pictures and messages, establish online friendships, and create personal web pages to reflect their interests. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok emerged between 2010 and 2016; the latter two have become highly popular with younger internet users. Most of these platforms are free to use, generating revenue by selling ad space to corporations.

In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari analyzes how personal device use may be changing cognition. The average American spends over three hours on their phone each day. Devices encourage users to practice “attention switching,” shifting focus rapidly from one task or topic to another—a practice that has been proven to diminish the quality of people’s concentration. Hari notes: “This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus” (38). For example, literacy professor Anne Mangen has demonstrated that people read more quickly and superficially on screens than on paper, a reading style which can become their “default” (81).