[HN Gopher] Attention didn't collapse. It was stolen (2022)
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Attention didn't collapse. It was stolen (2022)
Author : yamrzou
Score : 77 points
Date : 2023-08-26 20:18 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| thombles wrote:
| 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-f...
| apsurd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| In our modern society, everyone is a victim and it's always
| someone else's fault. My opinion that people in America do have
| choices and their lives are the sum of those choices inevitably
| elicits a lot of rather angry responses.
|
| All the people I've gotten to know over the years are all where
| they are as a result of their choices.
|
| The interesting thing about deciding to own your choices is
| it's empowering - you can choose to change your life. The
| victims, however, have unpowered themselves, and thus remain
| forever hapless victims.
|
| For example:
|
| 1. Live in a bad location? Move
|
| 2. Uneducated? Education is free over the internet
|
| 3. Weak? Exercise
|
| 4. Overweight? Eat less
|
| 5. Drug addicted? Treatment is available
|
| 6. Criminal record? Start your own business
|
| 7. Unhappy with your finances? Learn how to invest
|
| 8. Your friends drag you down? Discard them
|
| 9. Hate your boss? Quit and get another job
|
| And so on. None of this is easy. It will take effort. It's up
| to you.
| sph wrote:
| Everything is easy if you trivialise it enough. This is why
| self-help books are America's #1 genre and literary export.
|
| Real life, on the other hand, is a tad more complicated. The
| rule of thumb is don't waste time with people that think they
| have all the answers. Either they're lying to you, hopelessly
| naive, or have no real life experience.
|
| > Drug addicted? Treatment is available
|
| > Criminal record? Start your own business
|
| > Unhappy with your finances? Learn how to invest
|
| I mean, seriously? You forgot "poor? Become rich."
| WalterBright wrote:
| I specifically wrote it wasn't easy.
| sph wrote:
| The "it isn't easy" is the bloody important part that
| none of your slogans touch upon, so they're not even
| worth the memory they're stored in. There is no insight
| to be gained from any of them.
| ajb wrote:
| Responsibility _does not mutually exclude_. I 'm a bit
| disappointed in a compiler engineer not being alive to the
| logic of that. So many political arguments (in both
| directions) based on this bogus reasoning, that A can affect
| an outcome, so therefore B who exerts influence on it has no
| responsibility. Doesn't work that way.
| smogcutter wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Thesis just kids in general. They'll grow out of it or they
| won't.
| nradov wrote:
| The vast majority of heavy social media users don't meet the
| clinical definition of being addicts. Many of them have other
| mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, or
| neuroticism. But it's not particularly helpful to compare
| Instagram to nicotine or opioids.
| moffkalast wrote:
| In the words of Jack Sparrow, "Me? I'm dishonest, and a
| dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest."
|
| You can always trust a corporation to be a corporation. These
| days I'm frankly more surprised when I'm _not_ screwed over.
| johnea wrote:
| These are not mutually exclusive choices.
|
| I own my choices, AND I blame the corps for a LOT of the damage
| done in the world today, especially loss of attention span.
|
| More guns in slack jawed drunk idiot's hands --> more shooting
|
| More eye candy apps in people's hands --> more slack jawed
| idiots
|
| People can only "choose" among the choices in front of them,
| and most people choose not based on what's going to be best for
| them, but on "what's popular".
|
| For discussion's sake, let's just call this phenomenon "monkey
| brain".
|
| The fact is that 1st world IQ is in decline because an
| increasing amount of the population can't pay attention.
|
| I personally don't buy the argument that it's genetic. It seems
| quite clear this phenomenon is being driven by social norms.
| llamaLord wrote:
| I tend to have a view somewhat similar to this IMO.
|
| My way of managing this stuff has been to straight up block the
| worst offending services on all my devices (Facebook, Twitter),
| and use tools to restrict the amount of time I can access the
| others that I know steal my attention, but i've consciously
| decided I get enough value from to make a small amount of theft
| worth it (reddit, hacker news, etc).
|
| I get 15 minutes a day on Reddit and HN (each), but all
| "traditional" social networks are flat out blocked.
|
| It's exactly the same style I would use if I had a traditional
| addiction I was trying to manage. Use tools to make it
| impossible to access the things that feed the addiction the
| worst, and other tools to force moderation with the things that
| make my life a bit better/more interesting, but could lead to
| slippery slopes.
| kwanbix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think as long as quarterly numbers are rewarded, they'll
| continue to be optimized.
|
| You get what you measure for, after all.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| 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)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| 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.
| civilized wrote:
| 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.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Previous discussion
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| [dead]
| underlipton wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway_noone wrote:
| I read most of the article and then went outside for a cigarette.
| foknvp2er12 wrote:
| [dead]
| wand3r wrote:
| 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.
| networkchad wrote:
| [dead]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Thanks I needed a tl:dr; I definitely didn't have the
| attention span to read it all!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| anolog0 wrote:
| 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.
| yabatopia wrote:
| No need to panic: there is some research available. I found
| this article on The Verge an interesting read: Why note-taking
| apps don't make us smarter,
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps...
| .
|
| It links to an article in the New York Times, citing a study
| that lasted approximately 20 years. (No direct link, because
| paywall)
|
| Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the
| University of California, Irvine, and the author of "Attention
| Span," started researching the way people used computers in
| 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5
| minutes. "I was astounded," she told me. "That was so much
| worse than I'd thought it would be." But that was just the
| beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average
| time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it's down to about
| 47.
| anolog0 wrote:
| Thanks for the response. That's an interesting study, but is
| it implying that we spend less time on websites because our
| attention spans are worse, or our attention spans are worse
| because most websites are more easily scanned, digested, and
| moved on from? Obviously the web itself has changed a lot in
| the past 20 years, not just people's supposed attention
| spans.
|
| Honestly, ignoring that entirely, I don't see why we would
| have to measure attention span through a metric like duration
| spent on websites. Is it really so hard to measure it just by
| giving people a task and paying attention to when their focus
| shifts from it? And, supposing people are generally just as
| good at sitting down and doing a task as they were 20 years
| ago (so long as they don't get interrupted by their phones),
| is there something else people mean when they talk about
| attention spans getting worse?
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Turns out, a lot of people have their own opinions about
| society that aren't blessed and handed to them by social
| scientists.
| convolvatron wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's almost as if HN isn't a monoculture.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| -
| andsoitis wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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..
| Gunax wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| > 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."
| wand3r wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You
| Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on
| 6 January.
| guntars wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| From a practical perspective it's definitely your problem if
| you need a car...
| guntars wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| 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
| hmmmcurious1 wrote:
| Thats how humans talk when their attention gets stolen
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| text-ada-001?
| Liquix wrote:
| _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.
| foknvp2er12 wrote:
| [dead]
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| 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
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