Stolen Attention

When journalist and author Johann Hari realized how difficult it was to focus on something in recent years, he first blamed himself. But then he realized that most people actually suffer from the same problem. So when he started researching the issue and talking to experts, he discovered that there were much deeper and more comprehensive reasons. In Stolen Attention , Hari examines these reasons in detail, as well as thinking about ways to regain our attention.
Emphasizing that individual efforts, in other words, trying to solve the problem by making some changes in our own lives, can only be effective to a certain extent, Hari states that “we need to collectively confront the forces that steal our attention from us and force them to change.” He says that this is an urgent issue because a society that is distracted cannot focus on even the most important problems and cannot produce solutions.
“If we continue to be a society that sleeps too little and works too much, that changes activities every three minutes, that is monitored and tracked by social media sites designed to learn and manipulate our weaknesses, that lives on high alert from stress, that feeds on spikes and crashes of energy, that breathes a chemical soup full of brain-damaging toxins every day – we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems, yes. But there is an alternative. Organize and fight back – fight the forces that are setting our attention on fire and replace them with forces that will help us heal.”