I think the rot had begun to set in well before it - the period during covid just allowed social media companies to tighten their grip on our attention. Talking to people, I know I’m not alone in this, though I think it’s too easy to just blame lockdowns, as many people have said to me. Now, I do well to read one or two pages before I have to stop and check on something. Mornings, afternoons or evenings could disappear before I’d look at a clock, lost in an author’s imagination. It used to be that I could read for an hour and not even notice the passing of time. I had to read parts of ‘Stolen focus’ in small snippets, because my own attention span has taken a beating over the years. “One day, James Williams-the former Google strategist I met-addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: 'How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?' There was a silence in the room. Of course, it’s not a total shock when you realise that the aim of the social media companies is to get you to spend more and more time on their sites, and to hell with societal or personal consequences, as we have now seen. This is one of the many fascinating conversations that Johann Hari has in ‘Stolen focus’ with some of the leading names from Silicon Valley, as well as over 200 of the top scientists and researchers looking at attention and focus. He now ‘feels sort of dirty,’ as increased social media use has lead to people becoming angrier, less empathetic and spending less time tackling social issues, weakening social and familial bonds.

In ‘Stolen Focus’ we learn that he thought that tech advances would help ‘change the world’ and lead to social progress in many fields. He now sees that, along with sites such as twitter, the infinite scroll makes you spend 50% more time on social media. He believed it was a good design, and increased the site’s speed and efficiency.

This is known as the ‘infinite scroll’ and was invented by Aza Raskin, who now feels bad about it. I could do this for an hour and not notice time passing. Sure, there was the odd post or comment, but I just seemed to spend most of my time mindlessly just scrolling down the page, which was endless and filled with the minutiae of people’s lives, many of whom were strangers to me.

I had a number of issues with it, but one thing that concerned me was how long I spent just scrolling. I quit Facebook about eight years ago, back in 2015.

Stolen focus book