Setting Society Ablaze
Living in the Wreckage of a Social Media World
My friend, and former host of The Englewood Review podcast, Jen Pollock Michel had a superb meditation on Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus, and the challenges of paying attention. Check it out, and subscribe to her Substack, if you don’t already!
After a restful holiday season (and my reflection for the New Year), I am returning today to my series of posts on Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. This post is the fourth in this series, and my previous post (The Decline of Reading – And its Effect on Our Ability to Pay Attention) has links to all the previous posts in the series.
This post is made freely available to Substack readers, but if you appreciate The Conversational Life, please consider helping to sustain our work with a paid subscription ( $5/month or $50/year ).
About a third of the way through Stolen Focus, in chapters six and seven, Johann Hari finally gets around to addressing what many people presume is the major factor in our inability to pay attention: technology (and specifically the smartphone and social media platforms). I have appreciated that Hari is building a broader case that doesn’t just lay the blame at the feet of our technological malaise, but by this point I’m ready to hear his explanation of how technology fits into this case.
Hari is by no means anti-technology, but as the titles of these two chapters indicate, the problem isn’t really technology, but the manifold ways that internet technology has been exploited to “track and manipulate us.” Hari has been insistent throughout the book thus far that our struggles to pay attention aren’t primarily personal problems – a lack of self-discipline, for instance. Rather, he articulates socioeconomic forces – to borrow biblical language, we might call these forces powers or principalities – that are preying upon our vulnerabilities as humans. The aim of these two chapters (which really is a single chapter, broken into two parts) is to identify “six ways in which our technology, as it currently works, is harming our ability to pay attention – and that these causes are united by one deeper force that needs to be overcome” (106).
Hari spends a significant amount of time, basically the first of this pair of chapters, setting up how he arrived at these conclusions, and introducing the technological experts, who have been guides for him, helping him to understand how the prevailing social media technologies are undermining our ability to pay attention and to flourish. Most prominent among these guides is Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer, who raised important ethical questions about how Google and other social media companies operate. Tristan’s story is central to the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.
Synopsis of The Social Dilemma (via Wikipedia)
This documentary dives into the psychological underpinnings and the manipulation techniques by which, it claims, social media and technology companies addict users. People's online activity is watched, tracked, and measured by these companies, who then use this data to build artificial intelligence models that predict the actions of their users. Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, explains in the documentary that there are three main goals of tech companies:
The engagement goal: to increase usage and to make sure users continue scrolling.
The growth goal: to ensure users are coming back and inviting friends that invite even more friends.
The advertisement goal: to make sure that while the above two goals are happening, the companies are also making as much money as possible from advertisements.
Harris summed this up with the warning: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product"
If you haven’t already watched The Social Dilemma, I would highly recommend it, especially if you have been following along with this series on Stolen Focus. Even if you have watched it, you might want to watch it again. As a result of watching this documentary in 2020, I scaled back my personal habits around social media, and also the role that social media plays in the work of The Englewood Review of Books.
Many technology companies, like Google, Facebook, and all the other social media platforms, are constantly building profiles for each one of their millions of users. This profile was described to Hari by one expert as a sort of voodoo doll that models that user’s habits and interests, for the purpose of selling advertising for increasingly specific products that the user might want or need. Hari writes:
“It was explained to me that whenever something is provided by a tech company for free, it’s always to improve the voodoo doll. Why is Google Maps free? So the voodoo doll can include the details of where you go every day. Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap as $30, far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist of not just what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home” (126-127).
Yikes! The dark technological underbelly as described by Hari is indeed a creepy one, but it does ring true with my own experience of these technological tools and that of many friends with whom I have discussed these technologies. The primary end that these technologies seek is, of course, PROFIT, and we have handsomely rewarded them with it. But one crucial thing is being lost in the process, an unfortunate sort of collateral damage: our ability to pay attention.
The key component in how many of these technologies work is their algorithm. The algorithm is the matrix which draws upon the profile of a specific user to show them content that will keep their attention drawn toward that platform. Hari writes:
“When Facebook [and other technology platforms] decide what you see in your news feed, there are many thousands of things that they could show you. So they have written a piece of code to automatically decide what you will see” (130).
These algorithms could be written in many different ways. They could show us things that make us happy. They could show us things that make us furious. And so forth. But the actual algorithms that are used have “one key driving principle that is consistent. [They] show you things that will keep you looking at your screen. That’s it. … [The] more time you look, the more money they make” (130).
After teasing the six ways that these technologies are undermining our capacity for attention at the beginning of chapter six, Hari finally gets around to naming them halfway through chapter seven:
“These sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards. They make us hunger for hearts and likes. … This craving will drive you to pick up your phone more than you would if you had never been plugged into this system.”
“These sites push you to switch tasks more frequently than you normally would – to pick up your phone, or click over to Facebook on your laptop. When you do this, all the costs to your attention caused by switching … kick in.”
“These sites learn … [They] get to know what makes you tick, in very specific ways – they learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you, what enrages you. They learn your personal triggers – what, specifically, will distract you. [Social media] learns your most distractible spots and targets them.”
“Because of the way the algorithms work, these sites make you angry a lot of the time. Scientists have been proving in experiments for years that anger itself screws with your ability to pay attention. … The business models of these sites are jacking up our anger every day.”
“In addition to making you angry, these sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger. … [They] make you feel that you are in an environment full of anger and hostility, so you become more vigilant – a situation where more of your attention shifts to searching for dangers, and less and less is available for slower forms of focus like reading a book or playing with your kids.
“These sites set society on fire. … We don’t just pay attention as individuals, we pay attention together as a society. … There is evidence that these sites are now severely harming our ability to come together as a society to identify our problems and to find solutions … They are damaging not just our attention as individuals, but our collective attention. At the moment, false claims spread on social media far faster than the truth. … If we are lost in lies, and constantly riled up to be angry with our fellow citizens, this sets off a chain reaction. It means we can’t understand what’s really going on. In those circumstances, we can’t solve our collective challenges. This means our wider problems will get worse. As a result, the society won’t just feel more dangerous – it will actually be more dangerous. Things will start to break down. And as real danger rises, we will become more and more vigilant.”
This final cause, of course, is the most insidious one. If we agree that technologies are destroying us – personally, and in our homes, churches, and governments – we can certainly opt out personally, but these technologies are so widespread and they have usurped our capacity for communicating with one another such that one’s absence would basically go unnoticed.
More demonically, we will struggle to communicate with others in order to resist their destructive powers. If the internet is the new public square within which the vast majority of people dwell, how are we going to communicate effectively that this environment is toxic and should be resisted? It’s difficult even to imagine in today’s world how this message would be spread without use of these internet technologies. It is certainly possible to imagine what an effective resistance might look like, but it would necessarily unfold slowly, and leave us vulnerable to the urgency of a host of other potential catastrophes that are already circling our society like vultures (Government shutdowns! Economic collapse! Climate change! Presidential elections! Etc.) These pressing challenges need our attention and organization, but how do we re-cultivate the capacity to do so without internet technologies that largely serve to stoke these fires? And how would resistance efforts survive these technologies’ immense capacity to track our thoughts and movements and to distract and disrupt us?
Hari provides a striking example from Brazil of how activists who were using the internet to organize for the preservation of democracy were, in doing so, inadvertently supporting technological platforms that were fueling anti-democratic powers in their homeland, the very forces that they were fighting against.
I struggle to imagine how we might move forward as a society. If there is a way forward, it would be – as Jesus infamously said – easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for us to find it. Hari has some thoughts in this vein, and they are good ones, to which we will turn in the coming posts in this series, but as good as they sound, they seem so small and insufficient.
In spite of my failures of imagination here, I remain devoted to the way of Jesus, which if taken literally and seriously is a story about a God who delights in cultivating the unimaginable and bringing it to fruition (bits of leaven and mustard seeds and yes, even the resurrection of those who once were dead!)
Lord have mercy on us. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.
Wow, thank you. It validates my struggle with social media. I felt I should show up there more often despite not liking it or feeling disturbed more than informed after scrolling, besides loosing all this precious time. I wonder if there will be an opposite movement which has already started. Just like fast food is still around slow food has gained ground and people come back to the basics. May be there will be a slow media some day, too.
I understand and agree with the point here but I would also argue that there is a wider context of advertising that has been impacting for decades. Naomi Klein was raising the dangers of a society where all discourse is funded by advertising before social media in 'No Logo'. In the UK, there is perhaps a different view to this than in the US because of the role of the BBC. The BBC has been under attack from right wing forces that would love to see its destruction for over a decade. That's partly because it works on a model outside of advertising.
Advertising conforms what is produced and how, within and outside of social media. Perhaps that impacts reading, particularly in the US, as books are one of a dwindling number of advertising-free media.