10 ms·

Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

150 points by rzk 3y ago

throwaway14356 3y ago
you can persistently keep talking to people 7 days per week, drives them nuts but eventually they return to earth for as long as you keep it up. skip 3 days and all answers are humm uhh again, if you get any
- lencastre 3y ago
  What
  - hmmmcurious1 3y ago
    Thats how humans talk when their attention gets stolen
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    text-ada-001?
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    i know people who only do screens, they cant have a conversation anymore, if you say something they don't hear you, if you poke them they say they are busy. seems reasonable until a year goes by without any conversation. then its fair to wonder where they went. i don't normally keep talking if people rather not listen or participate but if i force it they produce short sentenced, then long ones, then dialogs and stories, make jokes, have a laugh. they stay that way as long as i maintain the effort. skip a week and they forget how to talk again
foknvp2er12 3y ago
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jay_kyburz 3y ago
I think I would rather people choose to turn off their notifications, and uninstall social media rather than government intervention. It's a lot of work though. I recently did a factory reset of an Android tablet and, wow, it's quite a lot of work to get it to shut up. I also religiously disable any notifications on windows as well, but Microsoft have been making them a mandatory feature of some applications. Snip and Sketch for example requires you to click on the notification if you want to get to the Sketch part. I much prefer the old way. (It also had less annoying animation)
- civilized 3y ago
  I only allow push notifications for messages from loved ones. For any other app, the moment it sends me a notification it gets banned from pushing anything ever.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I don't have Facebook or Twitter installed any more (and never had Instagram or TikTok - I'm too old). I log on to their websites on my phone if I want to see something. It's a good amount of friction.
mrwnmonm 3y ago
[dead]
throwaway_noone 3y ago
I read most of the article and then went outside for a cigarette.
- foknvp2er12 3y ago
  [dead]
- wand3r 3y ago
  Right? Frankly this is barely an exaggerated tl;dr: My Godson was randomly obsessed with Elvis for one summer so years later I forced him to go to Graceland but he wanted to be on snapchat and also watches porn. I needed to understand why this happened so I traveled to 3 different continents to speak with experts but I won't tell you much about what they said. I vacationed to Provincetown and did a digital detox I saw on Oprah. Anyway we should just tell Google and Facebook to shutdown. We must fight for these rights like feminists fought for abortion rights (which they just lost) we can't blame ourselves for this problem, its systemic.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Thanks I needed a tl:dr; I definitely didn't have the attention span to read it all!
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - networkchad 3y ago
    The abortion quip makes me chuckle. Every legal scholar (including the queen bee RBG herself) warned for decades that Roe v Wade was originally decided on a stretch of a privacy argument. My recommendation: don’t try to shoehorn morally debatable things in via another vehicle hoping for a miracle. You may get your miracle, but it will most likely be temporary. When you argue very important things, stick to the central pillars of the idea. Don’t be enthralled by the thought of a “quick win”.
- deleted 3y ago
anolog0 3y ago
Why is it that every time this moral panic is written about, there are no solid studies to back it up? Surely, if there was really a society-wide epidemic of focus, there would be some clear metric for focus which researchers would have 20-30 years of data and studies on, right? This should be a very testable hypothesis, so where is all the hard science on it? Even in this article, the author just takes some statements from neuroscientists and a study on context-switching in order to make a bunch of unfounded conjecture.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Turns out, a lot of people have their own opinions about society that aren't blessed and handed to them by social scientists.
  - convolvatron 3y ago
    which is all fine, desirable, and ultimately necessary. that doesn't mean that they make good arguments that help us try to decide what to do, convince other people, or even underscore the potential value of those opinions
    - smogcutter 3y ago
      HN: what, no research? Also HN: social science research is garbage and everyone who practices it is somewhere on a spectrum between delusion and fraud
      - bcrosby95 3y ago
        It's almost as if HN isn't a monoculture.
        smogcutter 3y ago
        I’ll need to see some research backing that up
- 3y ago
Gunax 3y ago
I think it's a thoughtful tale, but I really cannot get behind the premise. Was our attention really stolen? Is this a literal claim, or just hyperbole? It's a vice of the modern world. We have made food that tastes wo good, you want to eat forever. We have drugs which give you euphoria (for a time). And, we have entertainment that is far better than before. Well, for one I don't think there is anything particularly unique about the web. We have had 100 years of electronic entertainment. The sentiment used to be 'TV is rotting our brains'.
- Dfiesl 3y ago
  He's probably speaking figuratively when he says "stolen". I think he's referring to how we didn't really see it coming until it was too late and now a lot of people have been left without the ability to pay attention.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > Was our attention really stolen? Is this a literal claim, or just hyperbole? It's obviously figurative... unless you believe Professor MindMiner has built a machine to *schlorp* liquidified Attention out of unsuspecting victims into his own swollen and increasingly-monomaniacal cranium. However it's much shorter than "impaired or damaged without our informed consent by outside forces because it profits them to do so."
  - Gunax 3y ago
    Well, that's funny. But I take it to mean that it was intentionally made addictive, rather than just being enjoyable. By analogy, some people say that food is being made addictive. But I think there is a dubious difference between an addictive hamburger and just a tasty hamburger.
wand3r 3y ago
This article was a tough read because of the meandering prose and weird personalization narrative they shoe-horned in. > We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model Cool that the Guardian flew this person to like 3 different locations for the story. Great conclusion. We could also solve poverty by giving everyone high paying jobs... Tristan Harris is referenced in the article and I find his work on social media/attention to be very interesting.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  > The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.
- stevage 3y ago
  That's not a good analogy. We actually could do this, in the same way that society has banned various other categories of harmful products. The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.
  - wand3r 3y ago
    Point ceded on the analogy. The point I was trying to make is that the only solution was a flippant suggestion that we just "ask social media companies to change their business model". Leaving aside how difficult of a proposition that is, it would have extremely negative knock-on effects. These companies are roughly 50% of the S&P 500 top 10. > The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of. Ya I mean 655K people died fixing that issue[1] I admit I am being unfair here, but the trend of "identifying" an obvious and well known problem and writing an article about it, really frustrates me. We KNOW climate change[2] is a problem, we KNOW social media is bad, we KNOW that housing/living costs in much of the world are unaffordable for generations of people. I would appreciate at least exploring the surface area of what a real solution could be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt... [2] Those that do not accept climate change still recognize that our key fuel inputs are finite resources. Thus we still need to make changes to prevent foreign wars, increased pricing and maintaining global progress.
Liquix 3y ago
Stolen Focus (the book this article is an excerpt of) is a solid - if meandering - overview of society's rapidly declining attention span, featuring insight from behavioral psychologists, senior FAANG engineers, etc. It probably won't teach you anything new, but would make a great gift for the casual reader to get them asking questions about privacy.
thombles 3y ago
Stolen Focus is an interesting book and worth your time, but it's absolutely set on making the case that governments need to intervene on social media and I don't think it did it very well. I wrote a longish review digging into why back in June but it will probably only make complete sense if you've read the book. https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/06/08/book-review-stolen-focus.html https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/06/08/book-review-stolen-f...
- apsurd 3y ago
  Same with this article it seems. It's thought provoking. Worth the read. But the conclusion is rather underwhelming: it's an environment & societal problem. Also Big-Co is evil. That's not wrong per-say, but gee-whiz looks like we gotta add it to the growing list of how everything's terrible. The message is good just missed an opportunity to carry over the energy into action. I'll try: since we can't change society so easily, perhaps change the environment as a microcosm? Talk to friends about it. Talk to family. Coworkers. Try intentional things like no-phone dinners. Heads down time. Maybe these things are just as silly. And it's especially hard to alter kids behavior because it's very hard to control external social influences.
  - cptroot 3y ago
    One point that the article did land for me was the potential for individual change to be unhelpful. No-phone dinners only work if there isn't any sense of anxiety about not having your phone at dinner. That anxiety only goes away if you have an environment that allows you to unplug. Systemic changes like requiring workplaces to allow employees to have "off times" seem necessary to remove some of the baseline anxieties many of us have. If you want to talk about kids specifically, then you'd need some way to alter the anxieties that affect them the most. Anecdotally, it seems like kids (teens especially) end up with lots of FOMO and loneliness. The only structural reforms I've seen suggested as solutions to those were much more drastic than the ones proposed for adults, like preventing teenagers from using social media at all.
    - generic92034 3y ago
Aurornis 3y ago
All of these supposed revelations that companies try to make products that people will use were supposed to empower people to break free from these addictions Yet anecdotally, these narrative seem to give people more excuses to engage further with their addictions of choice. I’ve heard so many variations of “It’s not my fault I use so much (Facebook|TikTok|Reddit), don’t you know they have people employed to make them addictive!?” The people I know who best moderate their usage are the ones who own their own choices, not the ones who blame everything on corporations.
- smogcutter 3y ago
  > The people I know who best moderate their usage are the ones who own their own choices Strikes me that this is true of any addiction.
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    Not just addictions. The kids I have coached that have the worst behavior always blame their mistakes and behavior on anything but themselves. Zero personal responsibily.
    - brigadier132 3y ago
      Agreed, the words personal responsibility are frowned upon nowadays since our priority is comfort and 0 judgement. You can choose whether to believe you are in control or choose not to. If you choose not to dont be surprised when you fail to achieve your goals.
      - FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago
        Ah yes just choose it. Like you can just choose to be rich. Just do X or Y! Easy! Good god, so many people here are basically being manifestation coaches. “Just believe you are rich and the universe will make sure you are!”.
        3y ago
CamelCaseName 3y ago
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- andsoitis 3y ago
  > YouTube is essentially unavoidable in day to day life That’s absurd. What in your life makes watching YouTube every day an essential activity? What won’t you be able to accomplish if you don’t watch YouTube every day?
- johnea 3y ago
  > YouTube is essentially unavoidable in day to day life This statement is wholly and thoroughly wrong. Just plain incorrect. youboob is 100% avoidable and completely unnecessary. But I chose to respond to this post for a specific reason: it's a perfect example of the loss of perspective at the root of the "loss of attention" phenomenon. One can only believe youboob is necessary in a very carefully crafted artificial environment. This is why the #1 advice for everyone is: Go Outside! Put your phone down! The mental state of constant immersion has crippled your world view. You can very easily enjoy your day without ever engaging w/ the goggle corps..
guntars 3y ago
It sounds like her son has ADHD (and her too likely as it’s mostly genetic), just like me and millions of others. No, it’s not an epidemic. Social media and phones in general are the perfect “solution” for brains that are in a constant craving for stimulation. I don’t want to get into the whole personal responsibility vs evil companies dichotomy, but something that has helped me tremendously is wasting time on my own terms, not because I got a notification. There are days when I don’t receive a single email because I’ve aggressively unsubscribed from almost everything. Same for the notifications on the phone - if, say, Uber sends me a notification for a coupon for 50% off at Chick-fil-a, that’s an immediate banishment and the app can no longer send any. If that degrades the app experience when I do need a car, that’s their problem for abusing my trust.
- Zetice 3y ago
  From a practical perspective it’s definitely your problem if you need a car…
  - guntars 3y ago
    I can still get a car just fine by keeping the app open and seeing how far the driver is. The point is that some apps really do benefit from real time notifications, but it’s too tempting for PMs at those companies to not abuse it because of the metrics that they are evaluated on. Pretty sure the apps report back if the notifications are turned off so that’s my form of feedback into those same metrics.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
Was it really stolen or it's us who are constantly looking for content regarding stuff that happens 20,000ft above our heads? Maybe thinking that if we understand it then we'd rise to that level? When influencers fail to answer questions such as the name of the President or the speaker of the House or the capital of Argentina people laugh at them. I have come to realize that maybe they are in the right, they are extremely focused on what matters and pertains to their lives
kwanbix 3y ago
What would companies do when the people they hire cannot perform because of this addiction? What would companies do when people cannot earn money to pay for their services because of the addiction? What would they do when people do not have money to buy their phones? This is like drugs all over again. And companies, such as Facebook, Google, Snapchat, etc., do not care at all. Will we transition to a world of very short attention span and that would be the new normal?
- Albert931 3y ago
  Regarding to this I personally predict that in the future there will be a massive increase of unemployment because of the decrease of Attention spam among the young population, which will lead to more people failing in their education and them not being able of developing any abilities that are important for labor (Like discipline) Either that or there will be a decrease of professionals.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  I think as long as quarterly numbers are rewarded, they'll continue to be optimized. You get what you measure for, after all.
jmfldn 3y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539
underlipton 3y ago
There seem to be a lot of comments cluck-clucking about personal responsibility, and government intervention is bad, and the way this is written is off-putting, and- And no acknowledgment about how many on here can't really give an unqualified opinion because of where their paychecks originate. I can, though, and here it is: We've done this before, with cigarette companies, treating them with kid gloves and trying to avoid disrupting their business, and people kept getting sick and dying in droves until government finally acquiesced and committed to a full-court press. Laws making smoking inconvenient, and massive public service campaigns, and taxes, and more. You need to make a decision: are you going to continue building a livelihood off the suffering of your neighbors, and your family? Or are we going to do something about this, collectively?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I think 100 years from now, we're going to look back at Social Media like we currently look back on child labor and cigarettes. "Why on earth didn't we regulate it earlier?" All the signs are there that this stuff is terrible, but we plug our ears and pretend people are rational and will do what's good for them, and insist on treating corporations with kid gloves because stock market must go up. HN has a thick, libertarian "everything government does is bad" streak running through it and we sit at a position of great privilege--the privilege of being well-off techies, having agency over our lives and the ability and choice to avoid things that are bad for us. So you're not going to get much sympathy from this crowd.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  It's really a pointed question, isn't it, but cigarettes, and alcohol, and gambling, and porn, these are recreational, optional pursuits. The smartphone and social communications are something which have been woven into the fabric of society, into our daily lives, our recreation and employment alike, our consumerism, our interaction with everyone, from government agencies to next-door neighbors alike. So unlike the dude standing in the "no smoking" section with a cigarette, this epidemic will require far more intestinal fortitude and introspection for us to ultimately confront as detrimental, and it will be far more difficult for us to extricate ourselves from its tentacles.
- 3y ago
stevage 3y ago
A pity it didn't get specific at all about the mechanisms that steal focus. And even though cold turkey detox is not a viable solution, there are things individuals can do that help. Like disabling notifications for absolutely everything except messages from a small number of people.
- NavinF 3y ago
  > disabling notifications for absolutely everything except messages from a small number of people Doesn't everyone do this? Maybe that's why I find articles like this so confusing
  - stevage 3y ago
    From my experience, the vast majority of people do not. In our rarefied circles, quite a few people do.
GuB-42 3y ago
If there is a need to fix things, maybe it is a job for the church, or whatever entity holds spiritual power where you are. I say that as an atheist, but it is the kind of things an organized religion can achieve, especially a state religion. The idea of taking the time to appreciate the work of god, and not let the smartphones of the devil leave you astray. A secular government may act on technical points, maybe by raising taxes, imposing strict work hours, etc... But religions can really get to the core of the problem by acting on morals. Note that it is not a solution I would agree with personally, but I don't agree with heavy-handed government regulation either. I think it is something we need to learn how to deal with as it is the reality of a superconnected world, and governments (and religions) can help with that. Not something to fight against.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Secular governments are no less able or prone to act on morals than religious institutions (and nominally religious organizations are no less prone than secular ones to be tools for an elite to manipulate the masses in pursuit of the elite’s secular interests, with moral appeals as purely cynical tools of manipulation.)
haberman 3y ago
> Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a drip-feed of anxiety-provoking facts and trying to smush them together into some kind of sense. Instead, I simply read a physical newspaper once a day. I really miss the newspaper as a daily thing with a front page, sections, and a finite set of articles. Online news outlets (not to mention social media) all seem to exist in an "infinite scroll" model of constantly rotating stories that never run out. To get the daily model, it seems like you have to order a physical paper, but that's less desirable on account of the waste and clutter.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  For a brief time, I had the NYT sunday edition delivered to my house. I quickly discovered that the information was mostly useless to me, and it took way too much of my time to read all the way through. I ended up subscribing to Delayed Gratification (https://www.slow-journalism.com/ https://www.slow-journalism.com/) as a sort of middle ground. I get a nice, physical thing I can read. I'm able to read about current events, and all of the noise is filtered out for me.
mdip 3y ago
I had one of those "blessings in disguise" circumstances around 2017. I had just purchased a shiny new "phone of my dreams"[0] to have it land face down on the concrete two days later resulting in a few large cracks. I paid full price for the phone; it wasn't top of the line, I could afford to replace it but it wouldn't be "fun" -- and you can guess that I purchased no insurance. Owing to stubbornness and a general desire to punish myself a little so that I didn't make that mistake, again, I decided I'd continue to use it as long as the touch-screen accepted input and was basically usable (without injury). I expected to put up with it for a few months. A few things happened: Doom scrolling basically stopped, entirely. When I visited social media, I'd prefer my laptop so the time I spent there was "maybe once in the evening" rather than any time "I had to wait". I became the obnoxious guy who replied to texts with phone calls[1], and wrote e-mail replies that were longer than the "Sent from my ..." notice (which none of my e-mails contained because all were sent from my well worn keyboard). The phone didn't come out during dinners/meetings. To be clear: I don't feel the need to engage people in conversation simply because we're "both waiting for a meeting to start" and "we work together." But be the one guy in the room who doesn't have his phone out and just ... sit there. It's at least a little awkward; you sort of feel like a voyeur as everyone buries their nose in their screen as if the act of doing so makes them invisible to the outside world. It takes a second, but someone will almost always look up and notice you're ... just ... sitting there. You can watch the expression change on their face as they question this odd social behavior but it eventually lands on: Someone seems to think we shouldn't have our phones out!. A "guilty look" and a sly "sneak it into the pocket/chair" action later and ... now there are two people, sitting quietly, watching a room of people staring down at screens. By the time the third person follows, someone feels the need to start small-talking and wow some folks are out of practice! There were a few occasions where I thought I may have been giving off a look, unknown to myself. I really don't care about other's phone habits if I am not their parent or romantic partner. I write software and work with others who write software. Most of us our phone habits were excessive before "it was normal"; a few of you, somehow manage to handle conversation and Doom Scrolling simultaneously with minimal effort. So I occasionally found myself in the odd position of having to grant some sort of not-directly-requested-but-clearly-desired permission ... like I'd be doing exactly that if I could; don't mind me at all. It wasn't that I had a completely busted phone, it was just really inconvenient to read anything reasonable on; and I'd rather look at the dots in the ceiling tiles than remind myself of my $600 "dammit". Outside of those weird situations, in smaller group/1:1 settings I've found if my phone isn't out, their phone will stay in their purse/pocket and we'll actually engage in whatever activity brought us away from our home/homes and into the world. Going on a year, I had no interest in replacing the phone. I kept the broken screen phone for longer than I'd ever used a mobile device. As if to test my resolve, this phone refused to die. Eventually, on year 4.5, it stopped taking a charge. My new phone gets a little more use, but I'm much more aware of it, now. I'm the last person to take the thing out of my pocket; my notifications are customized to very quiet tones except for a small number of contacts so I know when it's worth "responding to the bell." I'm not recommending anyone go out and take a hammer to their phone, or anything. That first few months took a lot of resolve to not just plunk down the MasterCard and fix my mistake, but I'm glad I didn't. [0] It was a Samsung, but I can't remember which one. [1] Having the additionally side-effect of eliminating text messages for things that a few seconds thought, or at worst -- Google -- could handle with fewer social obligations attached.
thenerdhead 3y ago
I really enjoyed Stolen Focus. But that's because I wrote a similar book the same year. Some of the most thought-provoking resources on this topic in my opinion are: - Amusing Ourselves to Death - Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television - The Century of the Self - The Shallows - The Attention Merchants - Much of William James philosophy If anyone wants a copy of my book "Enough. Seeking less in a world of more." Send me an email and I'll gladly send you a free copy.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  I would but I'm trying to cutdown on attention stealing devices. It's ironic that you are trying to steal focus in order to tell others about how their focus has been stolen.
  - thenerdhead 3y ago
    No different than this guardian article stealing focus to do the same with a book launch!
  - taberiand 3y ago
    It's only stealing if something of value isn't being provided in return
don-code 3y ago
I developed a pathological need to monitor Slack at all hours. It was largely based on the culture at my company (a startup, at the time) - while there was no written rule to install Slack on your phone, responding to Slack messages at 10pm was clearly a way to get ahead at the company. I switched jobs and continued to run Slack on my phone, as everybody seems to do. Some time in 2021, I got a new phone and just... didn't reinstall Slack. The world didn't end. I found myself just as much on top of things as I was, in spite of the fact that I was now making intentional visits to my laptop off hours (I didn't quit it entirely). You're probably expecting me to say that this was rainbows and unicorns from there on out, but the exact opposite is true. Two years later, I'm still finding myself anxious much of the time, that I'm missing an important Slack message - sometimes at 10pm, sometimes at 6am. Sometimes I have, indeed, missed an important Slack message. Not having the capability to be notified instantaneously isn't a panacea. I'm only finding it better than the alternative.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  There's something that never sits right with me with the constant status-anxiety go above and beyond, nothing is ever enough hustle/schmooze culture. Part of me thinks "hmm well that's how the most successful/high status people in society do it/favor so it must be the way things ought to be", but who knows. To me, it seems to maximize for the appearance of competence and relative importance, and thus favors political/aggressively social types over anyone with a reasonable desire for work life balance, and not just because they have the audacity to demand time to themselves, but giving your body/mind time to rest improves the quality of your work.
- safety1st 3y ago
  So I run a remote-first company and our team is all over the globe. We had some people (including me) who had this issue at one point. I solved it by establishing two expectations: 1) No one is expected to be on Slack outside of their work hours. Full stop, pretty much. 2) Everyone must provide their personal mobile number to the company. They're all stored in an "emergency directory" (it's just a Google Doc). If there's an urgent emergency which can't wait until someone starts their next workday, you are allowed to call this number to reach them. In five years there's been one call through that emergency system, I think it was a big customer getting hacked. There have been many times where people just routed around the issue, like, "Oh, XYZ won't be available for the next 12 hours, I will talk to ABC instead and tell the stakeholder that I'll be able to get the expert engaged tomorrow" and it all worked out fine. Never been a big deal from what I've seen. We lost half our revenue in a very short period of time during Covid - it didn't trigger a call. Why should it have? Very bad news, but learning about it at 10pm wasn't going to improve anything. People all got a good night's sleep and then woke up and saw the terrible news in the morning, probably for the best because they were refreshed and relatively prepared to deal with it. Could you argue we're overall less responsive as a company because of this? Maybe but I don't think so, we haven't had customer complaints which would point to this. On the contrary we get customer feedback that our people thoroughly attentive to their needs. (Even with our customers we are clear up front about everyone's availability hours.) I do know that nobody is an anxiety zombie, and our people seem to be quite good at making rational and clear-headed decisions all the time, our company culture felt more panic-driven and knee-jerk before I instituted these rules. I'm pretty sure that allowing people to be totally unplugged for 16 hours a day if they want makes them better performers during the 8 when they're on the clock.
fasterik 3y ago
Reminder that Johann Hari has been guilty in the past of plagiarism, fabricating stories, and maliciously editing the Wikipedia pages of his critics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari Stolen Focus, like his other works, has been criticized for failing to cite evidence for some of its claims and for misrepresenting scientific studies. That doesn't mean he doesn't have valid points about the attention economy, but I think we should have a healthy skepticism.
- romusha 3y ago
  Thank you

150 points by rzk 3y ago

you can persistently keep talking to people 7 days per week, drives them nuts but eventually they return to earth for as long as you keep it up. skip 3 days and all answers are humm uhh again, if you get any

lencastre 3y ago
What
- hmmmcurious1 3y ago
  Thats how humans talk when their attention gets stolen
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  text-ada-001?
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  i know people who only do screens, they cant have a conversation anymore, if you say something they don't hear you, if you poke them they say they are busy. seems reasonable until a year goes by without any conversation. then its fair to wonder where they went. i don't normally keep talking if people rather not listen or participate but if i force it they produce short sentenced, then long ones, then dialogs and stories, make jokes, have a laugh. they stay that way as long as i maintain the effort. skip a week and they forget how to talk again

foknvp2er12 3y ago

[dead]

jay_kyburz 3y ago

I think I would rather people choose to turn off their notifications, and uninstall social media rather than government intervention. It's a lot of work though. I recently did a factory reset of an Android tablet and, wow, it's quite a lot of work to get it to shut up. I also religiously disable any notifications on windows as well, but Microsoft have been making them a mandatory feature of some applications. Snip and Sketch for example requires you to click on the notification if you want to get to the Sketch part. I much prefer the old way. (It also had less annoying animation)

civilized 3y ago
I only allow push notifications for messages from loved ones. For any other app, the moment it sends me a notification it gets banned from pushing anything ever.
robertlagrant 3y ago
I don't have Facebook or Twitter installed any more (and never had Instagram or TikTok - I'm too old). I log on to their websites on my phone if I want to see something. It's a good amount of friction.

mrwnmonm 3y ago

[dead]

throwaway_noone 3y ago

I read most of the article and then went outside for a cigarette.

foknvp2er12 3y ago
[dead]
wand3r 3y ago
Right? Frankly this is barely an exaggerated tl;dr: My Godson was randomly obsessed with Elvis for one summer so years later I forced him to go to Graceland but he wanted to be on snapchat and also watches porn. I needed to understand why this happened so I traveled to 3 different continents to speak with experts but I won't tell you much about what they said. I vacationed to Provincetown and did a digital detox I saw on Oprah. Anyway we should just tell Google and Facebook to shutdown. We must fight for these rights like feminists fought for abortion rights (which they just lost) we can't blame ourselves for this problem, its systemic.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Thanks I needed a tl:dr; I definitely didn't have the attention span to read it all!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- networkchad 3y ago
  The abortion quip makes me chuckle. Every legal scholar (including the queen bee RBG herself) warned for decades that Roe v Wade was originally decided on a stretch of a privacy argument. My recommendation: don’t try to shoehorn morally debatable things in via another vehicle hoping for a miracle. You may get your miracle, but it will most likely be temporary. When you argue very important things, stick to the central pillars of the idea. Don’t be enthralled by the thought of a “quick win”.
deleted 3y ago

anolog0 3y ago

Why is it that every time this moral panic is written about, there are no solid studies to back it up? Surely, if there was really a society-wide epidemic of focus, there would be some clear metric for focus which researchers would have 20-30 years of data and studies on, right? This should be a very testable hypothesis, so where is all the hard science on it? Even in this article, the author just takes some statements from neuroscientists and a study on context-switching in order to make a bunch of unfounded conjecture.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Turns out, a lot of people have their own opinions about society that aren't blessed and handed to them by social scientists.
- convolvatron 3y ago
  which is all fine, desirable, and ultimately necessary. that doesn't mean that they make good arguments that help us try to decide what to do, convince other people, or even underscore the potential value of those opinions
  - smogcutter 3y ago
    HN: what, no research? Also HN: social science research is garbage and everyone who practices it is somewhere on a spectrum between delusion and fraud
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      It's almost as if HN isn't a monoculture.
      - smogcutter 3y ago
        I’ll need to see some research backing that up
3y ago

Gunax 3y ago

I think it's a thoughtful tale, but I really cannot get behind the premise. Was our attention really stolen? Is this a literal claim, or just hyperbole? It's a vice of the modern world. We have made food that tastes wo good, you want to eat forever. We have drugs which give you euphoria (for a time). And, we have entertainment that is far better than before. Well, for one I don't think there is anything particularly unique about the web. We have had 100 years of electronic entertainment. The sentiment used to be 'TV is rotting our brains'.

Dfiesl 3y ago
He's probably speaking figuratively when he says "stolen". I think he's referring to how we didn't really see it coming until it was too late and now a lot of people have been left without the ability to pay attention.
Terr_ 3y ago
> Was our attention really stolen? Is this a literal claim, or just hyperbole? It's obviously figurative... unless you believe Professor MindMiner has built a machine to *schlorp* liquidified Attention out of unsuspecting victims into his own swollen and increasingly-monomaniacal cranium. However it's much shorter than "impaired or damaged without our informed consent by outside forces because it profits them to do so."
- Gunax 3y ago
  Well, that's funny. But I take it to mean that it was intentionally made addictive, rather than just being enjoyable. By analogy, some people say that food is being made addictive. But I think there is a dubious difference between an addictive hamburger and just a tasty hamburger.

wand3r 3y ago

This article was a tough read because of the meandering prose and weird personalization narrative they shoe-horned in. > We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model Cool that the Guardian flew this person to like 3 different locations for the story. Great conclusion. We could also solve poverty by giving everyone high paying jobs... Tristan Harris is referenced in the article and I find his work on social media/attention to be very interesting.

karaterobot 3y ago
> The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.
stevage 3y ago
That's not a good analogy. We actually could do this, in the same way that society has banned various other categories of harmful products. The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of.
- wand3r 3y ago
  Point ceded on the analogy. The point I was trying to make is that the only solution was a flippant suggestion that we just "ask social media companies to change their business model". Leaving aside how difficult of a proposition that is, it would have extremely negative knock-on effects. These companies are roughly 50% of the S&P 500 top 10. > The business model of slave plantation is another one that society got rid of. Ya I mean 655K people died fixing that issue[1] I admit I am being unfair here, but the trend of "identifying" an obvious and well known problem and writing an article about it, really frustrates me. We KNOW climate change[2] is a problem, we KNOW social media is bad, we KNOW that housing/living costs in much of the world are unaffordable for generations of people. I would appreciate at least exploring the surface area of what a real solution could be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt... [2] Those that do not accept climate change still recognize that our key fuel inputs are finite resources. Thus we still need to make changes to prevent foreign wars, increased pricing and maintaining global progress.

Liquix 3y ago

Stolen Focus (the book this article is an excerpt of) is a solid - if meandering - overview of society's rapidly declining attention span, featuring insight from behavioral psychologists, senior FAANG engineers, etc. It probably won't teach you anything new, but would make a great gift for the casual reader to get them asking questions about privacy.

thombles 3y ago

Stolen Focus is an interesting book and worth your time, but it's absolutely set on making the case that governments need to intervene on social media and I don't think it did it very well. I wrote a longish review digging into why back in June but it will probably only make complete sense if you've read the book. https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/06/08/book-review-stolen-focus.html https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2023/06/08/book-review-stolen-f...

apsurd 3y ago
Same with this article it seems. It's thought provoking. Worth the read. But the conclusion is rather underwhelming: it's an environment & societal problem. Also Big-Co is evil. That's not wrong per-say, but gee-whiz looks like we gotta add it to the growing list of how everything's terrible. The message is good just missed an opportunity to carry over the energy into action. I'll try: since we can't change society so easily, perhaps change the environment as a microcosm? Talk to friends about it. Talk to family. Coworkers. Try intentional things like no-phone dinners. Heads down time. Maybe these things are just as silly. And it's especially hard to alter kids behavior because it's very hard to control external social influences.
- cptroot 3y ago
  One point that the article did land for me was the potential for individual change to be unhelpful. No-phone dinners only work if there isn't any sense of anxiety about not having your phone at dinner. That anxiety only goes away if you have an environment that allows you to unplug. Systemic changes like requiring workplaces to allow employees to have "off times" seem necessary to remove some of the baseline anxieties many of us have. If you want to talk about kids specifically, then you'd need some way to alter the anxieties that affect them the most. Anecdotally, it seems like kids (teens especially) end up with lots of FOMO and loneliness. The only structural reforms I've seen suggested as solutions to those were much more drastic than the ones proposed for adults, like preventing teenagers from using social media at all.
  - generic92034 3y ago

Aurornis 3y ago

All of these supposed revelations that companies try to make products that people will use were supposed to empower people to break free from these addictions Yet anecdotally, these narrative seem to give people more excuses to engage further with their addictions of choice. I’ve heard so many variations of “It’s not my fault I use so much (Facebook|TikTok|Reddit), don’t you know they have people employed to make them addictive!?” The people I know who best moderate their usage are the ones who own their own choices, not the ones who blame everything on corporations.

smogcutter 3y ago
> The people I know who best moderate their usage are the ones who own their own choices Strikes me that this is true of any addiction.
- tastyfreeze 3y ago
  Not just addictions. The kids I have coached that have the worst behavior always blame their mistakes and behavior on anything but themselves. Zero personal responsibily.
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    Agreed, the words personal responsibility are frowned upon nowadays since our priority is comfort and 0 judgement. You can choose whether to believe you are in control or choose not to. If you choose not to dont be surprised when you fail to achieve your goals.
    - FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago
      Ah yes just choose it. Like you can just choose to be rich. Just do X or Y! Easy! Good god, so many people here are basically being manifestation coaches. “Just believe you are rich and the universe will make sure you are!”.
      - 3y ago

CamelCaseName 3y ago

andsoitis 3y ago
> YouTube is essentially unavoidable in day to day life That’s absurd. What in your life makes watching YouTube every day an essential activity? What won’t you be able to accomplish if you don’t watch YouTube every day?
johnea 3y ago
> YouTube is essentially unavoidable in day to day life This statement is wholly and thoroughly wrong. Just plain incorrect. youboob is 100% avoidable and completely unnecessary. But I chose to respond to this post for a specific reason: it's a perfect example of the loss of perspective at the root of the "loss of attention" phenomenon. One can only believe youboob is necessary in a very carefully crafted artificial environment. This is why the #1 advice for everyone is: Go Outside! Put your phone down! The mental state of constant immersion has crippled your world view. You can very easily enjoy your day without ever engaging w/ the goggle corps..

guntars 3y ago

It sounds like her son has ADHD (and her too likely as it’s mostly genetic), just like me and millions of others. No, it’s not an epidemic. Social media and phones in general are the perfect “solution” for brains that are in a constant craving for stimulation. I don’t want to get into the whole personal responsibility vs evil companies dichotomy, but something that has helped me tremendously is wasting time on my own terms, not because I got a notification. There are days when I don’t receive a single email because I’ve aggressively unsubscribed from almost everything. Same for the notifications on the phone - if, say, Uber sends me a notification for a coupon for 50% off at Chick-fil-a, that’s an immediate banishment and the app can no longer send any. If that degrades the app experience when I do need a car, that’s their problem for abusing my trust.

Zetice 3y ago
From a practical perspective it’s definitely your problem if you need a car…
- guntars 3y ago
  I can still get a car just fine by keeping the app open and seeing how far the driver is. The point is that some apps really do benefit from real time notifications, but it’s too tempting for PMs at those companies to not abuse it because of the metrics that they are evaluated on. Pretty sure the apps report back if the notifications are turned off so that’s my form of feedback into those same metrics.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

Was it really stolen or it's us who are constantly looking for content regarding stuff that happens 20,000ft above our heads? Maybe thinking that if we understand it then we'd rise to that level? When influencers fail to answer questions such as the name of the President or the speaker of the House or the capital of Argentina people laugh at them. I have come to realize that maybe they are in the right, they are extremely focused on what matters and pertains to their lives

kwanbix 3y ago

What would companies do when the people they hire cannot perform because of this addiction? What would companies do when people cannot earn money to pay for their services because of the addiction? What would they do when people do not have money to buy their phones? This is like drugs all over again. And companies, such as Facebook, Google, Snapchat, etc., do not care at all. Will we transition to a world of very short attention span and that would be the new normal?

Albert931 3y ago
Regarding to this I personally predict that in the future there will be a massive increase of unemployment because of the decrease of Attention spam among the young population, which will lead to more people failing in their education and them not being able of developing any abilities that are important for labor (Like discipline) Either that or there will be a decrease of professionals.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
I think as long as quarterly numbers are rewarded, they'll continue to be optimized. You get what you measure for, after all.

jmfldn 3y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539

underlipton 3y ago

There seem to be a lot of comments cluck-clucking about personal responsibility, and government intervention is bad, and the way this is written is off-putting, and- And no acknowledgment about how many on here can't really give an unqualified opinion because of where their paychecks originate. I can, though, and here it is: We've done this before, with cigarette companies, treating them with kid gloves and trying to avoid disrupting their business, and people kept getting sick and dying in droves until government finally acquiesced and committed to a full-court press. Laws making smoking inconvenient, and massive public service campaigns, and taxes, and more. You need to make a decision: are you going to continue building a livelihood off the suffering of your neighbors, and your family? Or are we going to do something about this, collectively?

ryandrake 3y ago
I think 100 years from now, we're going to look back at Social Media like we currently look back on child labor and cigarettes. "Why on earth didn't we regulate it earlier?" All the signs are there that this stuff is terrible, but we plug our ears and pretend people are rational and will do what's good for them, and insist on treating corporations with kid gloves because stock market must go up. HN has a thick, libertarian "everything government does is bad" streak running through it and we sit at a position of great privilege--the privilege of being well-off techies, having agency over our lives and the ability and choice to avoid things that are bad for us. So you're not going to get much sympathy from this crowd.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
It's really a pointed question, isn't it, but cigarettes, and alcohol, and gambling, and porn, these are recreational, optional pursuits. The smartphone and social communications are something which have been woven into the fabric of society, into our daily lives, our recreation and employment alike, our consumerism, our interaction with everyone, from government agencies to next-door neighbors alike. So unlike the dude standing in the "no smoking" section with a cigarette, this epidemic will require far more intestinal fortitude and introspection for us to ultimately confront as detrimental, and it will be far more difficult for us to extricate ourselves from its tentacles.
3y ago

stevage 3y ago

A pity it didn't get specific at all about the mechanisms that steal focus. And even though cold turkey detox is not a viable solution, there are things individuals can do that help. Like disabling notifications for absolutely everything except messages from a small number of people.

NavinF 3y ago
> disabling notifications for absolutely everything except messages from a small number of people Doesn't everyone do this? Maybe that's why I find articles like this so confusing
- stevage 3y ago
  From my experience, the vast majority of people do not. In our rarefied circles, quite a few people do.

GuB-42 3y ago

If there is a need to fix things, maybe it is a job for the church, or whatever entity holds spiritual power where you are. I say that as an atheist, but it is the kind of things an organized religion can achieve, especially a state religion. The idea of taking the time to appreciate the work of god, and not let the smartphones of the devil leave you astray. A secular government may act on technical points, maybe by raising taxes, imposing strict work hours, etc... But religions can really get to the core of the problem by acting on morals. Note that it is not a solution I would agree with personally, but I don't agree with heavy-handed government regulation either. I think it is something we need to learn how to deal with as it is the reality of a superconnected world, and governments (and religions) can help with that. Not something to fight against.

dragonwriter 3y ago
Secular governments are no less able or prone to act on morals than religious institutions (and nominally religious organizations are no less prone than secular ones to be tools for an elite to manipulate the masses in pursuit of the elite’s secular interests, with moral appeals as purely cynical tools of manipulation.)

haberman 3y ago

> Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a drip-feed of anxiety-provoking facts and trying to smush them together into some kind of sense. Instead, I simply read a physical newspaper once a day. I really miss the newspaper as a daily thing with a front page, sections, and a finite set of articles. Online news outlets (not to mention social media) all seem to exist in an "infinite scroll" model of constantly rotating stories that never run out. To get the daily model, it seems like you have to order a physical paper, but that's less desirable on account of the waste and clutter.

shepherdjerred 3y ago
For a brief time, I had the NYT sunday edition delivered to my house. I quickly discovered that the information was mostly useless to me, and it took way too much of my time to read all the way through. I ended up subscribing to Delayed Gratification (https://www.slow-journalism.com/ https://www.slow-journalism.com/) as a sort of middle ground. I get a nice, physical thing I can read. I'm able to read about current events, and all of the noise is filtered out for me.

mdip 3y ago

I had one of those "blessings in disguise" circumstances around 2017. I had just purchased a shiny new "phone of my dreams"[0] to have it land face down on the concrete two days later resulting in a few large cracks. I paid full price for the phone; it wasn't top of the line, I could afford to replace it but it wouldn't be "fun" -- and you can guess that I purchased no insurance. Owing to stubbornness and a general desire to punish myself a little so that I didn't make that mistake, again, I decided I'd continue to use it as long as the touch-screen accepted input and was basically usable (without injury). I expected to put up with it for a few months. A few things happened: Doom scrolling basically stopped, entirely. When I visited social media, I'd prefer my laptop so the time I spent there was "maybe once in the evening" rather than any time "I had to wait". I became the obnoxious guy who replied to texts with phone calls[1], and wrote e-mail replies that were longer than the "Sent from my ..." notice (which none of my e-mails contained because all were sent from my well worn keyboard). The phone didn't come out during dinners/meetings. To be clear: I don't feel the need to engage people in conversation simply because we're "both waiting for a meeting to start" and "we work together." But be the one guy in the room who doesn't have his phone out and just ... sit there. It's at least a little awkward; you sort of feel like a voyeur as everyone buries their nose in their screen as if the act of doing so makes them invisible to the outside world. It takes a second, but someone will almost always look up and notice you're ... just ... sitting there. You can watch the expression change on their face as they question this odd social behavior but it eventually lands on: Someone seems to think we shouldn't have our phones out!. A "guilty look" and a sly "sneak it into the pocket/chair" action later and ... now there are two people, sitting quietly, watching a room of people staring down at screens. By the time the third person follows, someone feels the need to start small-talking and wow some folks are out of practice! There were a few occasions where I thought I may have been giving off a look, unknown to myself. I really don't care about other's phone habits if I am not their parent or romantic partner. I write software and work with others who write software. Most of us our phone habits were excessive before "it was normal"; a few of you, somehow manage to handle conversation and Doom Scrolling simultaneously with minimal effort. So I occasionally found myself in the odd position of having to grant some sort of not-directly-requested-but-clearly-desired permission ... like I'd be doing exactly that if I could; don't mind me at all. It wasn't that I had a completely busted phone, it was just really inconvenient to read anything reasonable on; and I'd rather look at the dots in the ceiling tiles than remind myself of my $600 "dammit". Outside of those weird situations, in smaller group/1:1 settings I've found if my phone isn't out, their phone will stay in their purse/pocket and we'll actually engage in whatever activity brought us away from our home/homes and into the world. Going on a year, I had no interest in replacing the phone. I kept the broken screen phone for longer than I'd ever used a mobile device. As if to test my resolve, this phone refused to die. Eventually, on year 4.5, it stopped taking a charge. My new phone gets a little more use, but I'm much more aware of it, now. I'm the last person to take the thing out of my pocket; my notifications are customized to very quiet tones except for a small number of contacts so I know when it's worth "responding to the bell." I'm not recommending anyone go out and take a hammer to their phone, or anything. That first few months took a lot of resolve to not just plunk down the MasterCard and fix my mistake, but I'm glad I didn't. [0] It was a Samsung, but I can't remember which one. [1] Having the additionally side-effect of eliminating text messages for things that a few seconds thought, or at worst -- Google -- could handle with fewer social obligations attached.

thenerdhead 3y ago

I really enjoyed Stolen Focus. But that's because I wrote a similar book the same year. Some of the most thought-provoking resources on this topic in my opinion are: - Amusing Ourselves to Death - Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television - The Century of the Self - The Shallows - The Attention Merchants - Much of William James philosophy If anyone wants a copy of my book "Enough. Seeking less in a world of more." Send me an email and I'll gladly send you a free copy.

ipaddr 3y ago
I would but I'm trying to cutdown on attention stealing devices. It's ironic that you are trying to steal focus in order to tell others about how their focus has been stolen.
- thenerdhead 3y ago
  No different than this guardian article stealing focus to do the same with a book launch!
- taberiand 3y ago
  It's only stealing if something of value isn't being provided in return

don-code 3y ago

I developed a pathological need to monitor Slack at all hours. It was largely based on the culture at my company (a startup, at the time) - while there was no written rule to install Slack on your phone, responding to Slack messages at 10pm was clearly a way to get ahead at the company. I switched jobs and continued to run Slack on my phone, as everybody seems to do. Some time in 2021, I got a new phone and just... didn't reinstall Slack. The world didn't end. I found myself just as much on top of things as I was, in spite of the fact that I was now making intentional visits to my laptop off hours (I didn't quit it entirely). You're probably expecting me to say that this was rainbows and unicorns from there on out, but the exact opposite is true. Two years later, I'm still finding myself anxious much of the time, that I'm missing an important Slack message - sometimes at 10pm, sometimes at 6am. Sometimes I have, indeed, missed an important Slack message. Not having the capability to be notified instantaneously isn't a panacea. I'm only finding it better than the alternative.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
There's something that never sits right with me with the constant status-anxiety go above and beyond, nothing is ever enough hustle/schmooze culture. Part of me thinks "hmm well that's how the most successful/high status people in society do it/favor so it must be the way things ought to be", but who knows. To me, it seems to maximize for the appearance of competence and relative importance, and thus favors political/aggressively social types over anyone with a reasonable desire for work life balance, and not just because they have the audacity to demand time to themselves, but giving your body/mind time to rest improves the quality of your work.
safety1st 3y ago
So I run a remote-first company and our team is all over the globe. We had some people (including me) who had this issue at one point. I solved it by establishing two expectations: 1) No one is expected to be on Slack outside of their work hours. Full stop, pretty much. 2) Everyone must provide their personal mobile number to the company. They're all stored in an "emergency directory" (it's just a Google Doc). If there's an urgent emergency which can't wait until someone starts their next workday, you are allowed to call this number to reach them. In five years there's been one call through that emergency system, I think it was a big customer getting hacked. There have been many times where people just routed around the issue, like, "Oh, XYZ won't be available for the next 12 hours, I will talk to ABC instead and tell the stakeholder that I'll be able to get the expert engaged tomorrow" and it all worked out fine. Never been a big deal from what I've seen. We lost half our revenue in a very short period of time during Covid - it didn't trigger a call. Why should it have? Very bad news, but learning about it at 10pm wasn't going to improve anything. People all got a good night's sleep and then woke up and saw the terrible news in the morning, probably for the best because they were refreshed and relatively prepared to deal with it. Could you argue we're overall less responsive as a company because of this? Maybe but I don't think so, we haven't had customer complaints which would point to this. On the contrary we get customer feedback that our people thoroughly attentive to their needs. (Even with our customers we are clear up front about everyone's availability hours.) I do know that nobody is an anxiety zombie, and our people seem to be quite good at making rational and clear-headed decisions all the time, our company culture felt more panic-driven and knee-jerk before I instituted these rules. I'm pretty sure that allowing people to be totally unplugged for 16 hours a day if they want makes them better performers during the 8 when they're on the clock.

fasterik 3y ago

Reminder that Johann Hari has been guilty in the past of plagiarism, fabricating stories, and maliciously editing the Wikipedia pages of his critics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari Stolen Focus, like his other works, has been criticized for failing to cite evidence for some of its claims and for misrepresenting scientific studies. That doesn't mean he doesn't have valid points about the attention economy, but I think we should have a healthy skepticism.

romusha 3y ago
Thank you