danni naeil

Tag: Attention

  • Book review: Stolen Focus

    Book review: Stolen Focus

    In 2007 Douglas Coupland released the novel jPod. During a trip to the Czech Republic I read it on behest of my girlfriend, and I utterly loved it. Five nerds in cubicles (pods), assigned to their places due to the initial J of their respective surname, in a basement of Neotronic Arts are designing the gore in video/computer games. They’re joined by a sixth member, whose surname also begins with a J and she initially thinks they’re morons. They’re all born at the end of the 1970’s and beginning of the 1980’s and their attention span at work is maximum 15 minutes long. Morally they differ from their parents, they belong to the ego of the digital age and spend lots of time not working (a Gen X trait, Coupland’s generation I dare say). Having read it thrice it remains one of the my favourite books of all time.

    Fast forward to 2008, the year we travelled to the Czech Republic, and “Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and you little ego – it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now” as Johann Hari writes. For someone who’s managed Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts for organisations, I can only agree – it’s invasive and takes control of you. I’m happy jPod was released before social media and the new generation of smartphones wrecked the attention span and ability to focus completely.

    “How to slow down in a world that is speeding up?” Hari continues in the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again. He outlines twelve problems for our individual and collective attention spans, and ability to focus. All of them will not be covered here though. For that, you have to read the book.

    On average a person working in an office is undisturbed for approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Undisturbed by others, that is. The average attention span is merely 47 seconds, because people also interrupt themselves. All the time. Meanwhile it takes 23 minutes to return to a state of focus. Meaning we basically never stay focused.

    Hari interviewed lots of people for this book, James Williams at Oxford Internet Institute being one among them. His words resound deeper than many others (and there’s tons of important words said by intelligent people in the book). We need to take on crucial issues such as climate change, but “when attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down.” This is a hypothesis Hari clings to, and I concur: tearing attention apart means people can’t concentrate, can’t direct energy on proper things. As Hari writes, “Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection.” Mind-wandering is a state of mind people should enjoy more, but instead blocks it out more or less completely by staring at screens. Also due to the thinking that directed thoughts, meaningful thoughts and chores are good, while letting your brain do “nothing” is useless.

    To flood social media with more information is a very good way of blocking debates and conversations – it shortens the collective attention span. Add actual noise and sounds, which both deteriorate hearing capacities. Somehow we believe it’s an equilibrium: you listen to noise and sounds 50 % of the day, and you can recuperate if 50 % is quiet. But that really depends on the noise (background chatter for instance, or cars passing by), the sounds (simple, more occasional sounds) and the silence. Allowing exposure of sounds and noise for hours each day, combined with voices and music, hurts the ears and hearing. Eventually it will deteriorate by system overload. The same with your brain. It cannot evade being disturbed and deteriorates slowly, making you more stupid.

    Hari interviews Sune Lehmann, a Danish researcher on time, who exclaims that the new upperclass will be the ones with very long attention spans, always able to limit information input and aware of what they are actually doing. The rest of us will simply react to the information fed to us. We read and watch stories about people who can sleep less, eat poor and bad food, and still outperform the average person: the Bond villains and the tech prodigies. They never experience sleep deprivation, never seem to slow down. It’s the opposite of Andy Weir’s main protagonist in Project Hail Mary who states that humans become stupid when tired. We don’t comprehend that the reason behind “greatness” is mind-wandering, thoughtful discussions, promenades, information intake (and helpers, such as wives, butlers or servants): Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt writing their speeches and pondering tough decisions, Harry S. Truman thinking through information and memos before making extremely hard decisions. We desperately need the ability to think in order to grasp and tackle climate change, artificial intelligence and other important issues, though with ruined minds and attention spans we won’t. Another quote from James Williams: “You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering and deep thought.” 

    Lehmann reminds me of Cal Newport’s Deep Work: the future will belong to the people who can focus, who can work deep. Because Earl Miller from Massachusetts Institute of Technology says we’ve learned to compare ourselves to computer processors, machine parts with the ability to multitask, when in fact we can’t. When we try to do two or three things simultaneously, our brains are reconfiguring relentlessly. While we may believe we’re doing several things at the same time, our brains constantly start a new chore, gets interrupted by another one, stops and initiates the new chore, then gets interrupted again, stops and tries to reinitiate the first chore but actually has to restart a little bit further back than before, because of the interruption. On it goes. In some small doses it’s worse to check your Facebook feed continuously than to get stoned – and who’s allowed to get stoned at work?

    Hari continues to tackle issues such as school systems reining in our children’s abilities to learn and move (more) freely, diagnosing children with ADHD, how reading on screens is bleeding into how we read paper, and the Western world’s issues with nutrition and obesity (your tired body craves sugar and fat, which is omnipresent, we cannot evade it).

    One thing I appreciate with Hari is how he allows different arguments to meet in the book, carried by other people who oppose one another, or Hari himself. And he ends with hope, telling us about the generation his grandmothers belong to and how one of them fought for universal suffrage in Switzerland in the 1970’s. Regarding the possibility to challenge these twelve distractions, destroying our ability to focus, Hari writes:

    “No source of power, no set of ideas, is so large it can’t be challenged.”

  • Book review: How To Do Nothing

    Book review: How To Do Nothing

    Well. I obviously missed this book when it hyped in 2019. Perhaps I’ve seen it in some bookstore, though I doubt it. Since I’m reading books on technology, Brian Christian (a review on his book The alignment problem is coming soon) mentioned this book on The Ezra Klein Show and I finally read it.

    Jenny Odell, an artist and former teacher at Stanford University, wrote a book on how to do nothing (resisting the attention economy), published in 2019, on… many things. Usually, the books is classified as related to technology (and/or science), which can confuse a reader like me, because it’s not about merely about tech’s (contemporary) inherent obsession with attention and/or societal effects, but about being present, bonding with and relating to other beings, forgetting yourself.

    Odell opposes the sense and notion of time, “especially concerning technologies that encourage a capitalist perception of time, place, self and community.” Odell’s desire is ”awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community.” We should expand our sense of time, sympathy, empathy and embrace more than ourselves, more than humans. Life isn’t merely about me, my ego. I concur that time is, by many, perceived as production and nothing but production. The Marxist Franco “Bifo” Berardi words are quoted as “time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing””. Listen to many Swedish debates throughout the years, and you’ll hear the arguments against decreasing the numbers of working hours annually, or why weekends, holidays or daylight “saving time” (another book from Odell I’m soon reading) cost money – time isn’t productive. Swedes are their jobs, their occupation – or nothing, meaning you’re nothing if you don’t have an obvious occupation.

    Furthermore, she problematises how come nurturing and tending is unproductive, or at least not as productive as proper (industrial or consumer-based) production, because it’s not producing something new. The newness is inherit in a capitalist economy.

    Later on she questions the ideal of retreating (dubbed “The green wave” in Sweden during the 1970’s, related to Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, another book in-reading) from the hectic city life, with digital detox “treatments” (my brackets), because they’re simply for people with the right resources at their disposal. She urges us to participate, not hide or be exclusively elusive, and contemplate with others, rather than run away in an meaningless effort of releasing ourselves from society.

    Technology

    Related Odell asks “What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?” She argues for placefulness, to be situated in reality, where we actually are at any given moment. How meaningful are digital worlds when climate change alters the very foundation of humanity – is it of any use?

    Odell bashes tech profiles as different as the “tech mogul” (my brackets) Peter Thiel and Tristan Harris (the famous, sympathetic ex-Google employee, co-founder of Center for Humane Technology). She can’t see the difference in their efforts: what are they actually doing to improve the world – to give us more technology? We don’t need it. We must take time to think and act together with other people in real life. We must contemplate and realise the conception and perception of time is different. It simply can’t be seen as merely production.

    “Could augmented reality simply mean putting your phone down? And what (or who) is sitting in front of you when you finally do?” Odell asks. For someone who watched Spike Jonze’s movie Her and adored it, this is a blow. But a good one, right on the cheek where I need it. Reality is where we are, not where we want to be. We cannot create a true disconnect, however much we wish to daydream or watch things on the Internet. You simply cannot wish yourself to Mars or to the next week. You are where you are.

    “… the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment.” Yes. Much has been written on the topic of technology in the shape of social media or the Internet. But Odell turns to the public space. Suddenly, I’m fully aware of the the very few spaces, without money involved, that exist for an inhabitant or visitor of a city/municipality. Most places require you to spend money for presence, and the public spaces (indoors, I might add) are few. It isn’t simply about having money, but being able to be you in a place that doesn’t demand anything from you. Sitting at a table in the public library without spending is undervalued and with so much more than currency. It should be valued more than money.

    One of the best passages of the whole book is on the personality on social media versus real life. The inability to be yourself on social media and the ability to actually change your mind seems to be dissipating. People around you see a complex person, an identity that keeps evolving, whereas the identity on social media is constant, “as monolithic and timeless as a brand.”

    Odell mentions an art student “working” at an American company in 2008, spending her time staring out the window or going up and down the elevator, her job consisted of thinking. Sitting by a computer, secretly or blatantly reading posts on social media or news articles hides behind the mask of working, as you’re actually staring at the computer screen. Looking at the world, thinking things through, isn’t classified as work. It’s a blatant breaking of the rules – being unproductive. I can relate to this very well. It’s better to stare at a turned-off screen than out the window, because the latter signifies “doing nothing”. Even staring at useless Internet webpages is perceived as better than walking the corridors pondering a real issue related to work. People will ask what you’re actually doing staring out that window or on that walk. Is it really productive?

    I will return to the issue of attention in later reviews and posts. I’m thinking about writing much more on this very topic, since, Odell writes “attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw.” Attention is what you give to something else and time is a factual variable of your very life. Without time, you’re dead.

    Productiveness

    Achieving wealth by saving at least 10 % of your wage and invest in the stock market – FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) – has been a popular concept, or job, or aspiration, for many years in Sweden. Probably since the financial crisis of 2008-2010. As an idea it challenges the classic work ethics: work for 40 years, earn your wage and then retire and do some things (mainly travel and drink red wine) before you die comfortably of old age. Instead, work your ass off (as part of the educated middle class), save 10-50 % of your wage, invest correctly on the stock market, and retire when you’re about 40 years old. Spend the rest of your life with your kids, and do some projects (that remain focused on you, your ego) and beg to all possible gods that the stock market is continuously fed oil, coal and all the rest. Both ideas rest on basic mathematical solutions and – productivity.

    Odell challenges this idea completely, by claiming you should spend together with other people, walking in the vicinity of your house/flat, listen to people, engage with people, feel your emotions and don’t think of time as productive or non-productive, realising diversity species-crossing is as important as you are – everything in your life isn’t simply about you. It’s about multitude.