Johann Hari on the Crisis of Our Collective Attention

We are living through a serious crisis in our ability to focus and pay attention. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. For our kids, it’s even worse: for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems, there’s now one hundred children. Most of us can feel this problem scratching at us every day, fracturing our ability to get things done – but when I researched this topic for my book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, I learned there’s a layer to this crisis that many of us have not yet fully seen. 

It’s not only just our individual attention that is being battered and broken. It is our collective attention. All over the world, in countries as different as Britain, Brazil, and Burma, we are seeing strikingly similar political crises, and we become more polarized, less able to talk to each other, and turn to more extreme politics as a result. I came to believe it is not a coincidence that we are having the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s at the same time as this serious attention crisis. They are intimately connected. 

One of my earliest political memories is of the ozone layer crisis. Scientists discovered that a group of chemicals called CFCs which were contained in hairsprays and fridges were creating holes in the ozone layer that protects the planet from the sun’s rays, endangering life on earth. So what happened next? Ordinary people absorbed this information and saw that it was true. Then activist groups—made up of ordinary citizens—formed, and demanded a ban. These activists persuaded their fellow citizens that this was urgent and made it into a big political issue. This put pressure on politicians, and that pressure was sustained until those politicians banned CFCs entirely. At every stage, averting this risk to our species required us to be able to pay attention as a society – to absorb the science; to distinguish it from falsehood; to band together to demand action; and to pressure our politicians until they acted. It worked. Every country in the world banned CFCs, and the ozone layer has healed.

Does anyone think that would happen now? Most of us get our news from social media, and a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than real news, and during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, flat-out falsehoods on Facebook outperformed all the top stories at nineteen mainstream news sites put together. Today, we would get lost in stories asking – how do we even know the ozone layer exists? How do we know the holes were made by CFCs, and not the Jews, or some other foul conspiracy theory? We would be left focusing on rage and nonsense, while the holes in the ozone layer got bigger and bigger.

In Stolen Focus, I explain the twelve factors that are harming our attention today – many of which go far beyond our technology. But to understand this harm to our collective attention, I think you need to understand one in particular, which was taught to me in Silicon Valley by the technologists who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live.

If you open TikTok or Facebook or Twitter now, those companies immediately start to make money out of you, because you begin to see advertising – and every time you close the apps, their revenue stream disappears. So their business model is entirely about figuring out: how do we get you to open these apps as often as possible, and scroll as long as possible? So all of the genius in Silicon Valley – all the algorithms, all the A.I. – is geared towards figuring out how to keep you and your kids scrolling. They constantly track you (and me, and everyone you know) to figure out what keeps you scrolling.

And so those social media companies stumbled onto a truth about human psychology. It’s called ‘negativity bias,’ and it’s very simple: human beings will stare longer at something that has made them angry than they will at something that makes them feel good. If you’ve ever seen a car crash on the motorway, you know exactly what I mean – you stared longer at the mangled wreck than at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is deep in human psychology – but once it combines with algorithms designed to keep you scrolling, it creates a disastrous effect.

Picture two teenage girls who go to the same party, and then go home on the same bus. One of them posts a video that says they had a great time and loved it. The other posts an angry rant calling all the girls at the party skanks and all the boys pricks. The algorithms scan the kind of language you use—and they’ll put the first video into a few people’s feeds, and the second video into far more people’s feeds—because angry and hostile content makes people ‘engage’. You’ll post back: what do you mean they were skanks? You’re the skank. And on it goes. 

This is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls (and we all know what’s happened to teenage mental health). But now imagine a whole country where the kindest, sanest voices—arguing for moderation, decency, compromise—are muffled and pushed back, and the cruelest, most toxic voices are pushed to the front. Except you don’t have to imagine that. We’ve been living it for years now – with all the catastrophic effects on our political and collective attention.

None of this has to happen. As I learned and as I explain in the book, we can put these problems right. The technologist Dr James Williams explained to me that the axe existed for 1.4 million years before anyone thought to put a handle on it. The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days. We can fix the factors that are harming our individual and collective attention. But to do that, we have to understand what those factors are – and then together take on the forces that are harming us and our kids. We need to do this urgently – because we are facing an unprecedented series of crises as a species, not least the climate crisis. At time of our greatest challenges, we need to fight to preserve our greatest superpower – our ability to pay attention.