Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention
EXCERPT
At Google, he quickly learned, success was measured, in the main, by what was called “engagement” — which was defined as minutes and hours of eyeballs on the product. More engagement was good; less engagement was bad. This was for a simple reason. The longer you make people look at their phones, the more advertising they see—and therefore the more money Google gets. Tristan’s co-workers were decent people, struggling with their own tech distractions—but the incentives seemed to lead only one way: you should always design products that “engage” the maximum number of people, because engagement equals more dollars, and disengagement equals fewer dollars.
With each month that passed, Tristan became more startled by the casualness with which the attention of a billion people was being corroded at Google and the other Big Tech companies. One day he would hear an engineer excitedly saying: “Why don’t we make it buzz your phone every time we get an email?” Everyone would be thrilled—and a few weeks later, all over the world, phones began to buzz in pockets, and more people found themselves looking at Gmail more times a day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Johann Hari is the author of three New York Times best-selling books, and the Executive Producer of an Oscar-nominated movie and an eight-part TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson. His books have been translated into 40 languages, and been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky, from Elton John to Naomi Klein. His latest book, ‘Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention’, was published in January 2022.