Well, I was booked to go on @BBCRadio4 PM to challenge @johannhari101 about assertions made in his new book. He has pulled out for "personal reasons", so I'll just leave a thread about my concerns about his use of sources. I hope someone else will raise these questions with him.
Stolen Focus book is full of stats, full of references to scientific research. Can its author be trusted to handle this research – not to cherry-pick to help his case? I'll let you judge.
Let’s look at two examples. This is from a chapter about multitasking, but it also reaches towards Hari’s main point – that the seductions of digital culture are reducing our powers of concentration. 
A Carnegie Mellon study. Sounds neurosciency. Sounds conclusive. We imagine students distracted by their texts and alerts and losing test marks. And then this stat: everyone who uses a smartphone is reducing their powers of concentration by 20-30 per cent. Terrifying.
Hari doesn’t give you a source for this experiment. There’s no footnote to follow so it’s hard for the reader to check his working. But here it is. The experiment was commissioned by the authors of a business self-help book called The Plateau Effect. So it's not peer-reviewed.
The distracting messages mentioned were sent by the experimenters, and the subjects were told they contained important information about the test. They HAD to respond. So it tells you very little – nothing, I would suggest - about the ordinary seductions of the smartphone.
Moreover, the researchers concluded that the subjects adapted surprisingly well to these circumstances. Some who were warned that the interruptions would come actually did BETTER in the test than those who sat there unbothered by extra instructions from the experimenters.
Does Johann Hari tell us this? No. Instead, he says this research suggests that our species - yes, our species! - is losing 20-30 per cent of its brainpower because it uses mobile phones. Is this a reasonable assertion? I'd say no. I'd call it cherry-picking and exaggeration.
Here’s a second. More serious, because the book leans so heavily on it. Hari argues that there has been a historic loss in our ability to concentrate. That our “collective attention span” is shrinking. This idea has been part of the cultural conversation for years.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s happening. In fact, the idea of an average attention span isn’t taken seriously by very many academics. Which is why most of the references to such phenomena lead back to sources that are bad or non-existent. bbc.co.uk/news/health-38…
So, the evidence. Let’s look at the research that Hari says proves our attention spans are getting shorter. A group of researchers in Denmark, he says, “have shown that our collective ability to pay attention is rapidly shrinking”.
It was written up in the journal Nature Communication. “The phenomenon,” its authors concede, “lacks a strong empirical foundation.” Does Johann Hari quote that? No. The paper is here. It didn't make a big impact. If you read it I think you'll see why. nature.com/articles/s4146…
The authors attempt to measure the history of our “collective attention span” by comparing the longevity of twitter hashtags with the past four decades of box office receipts and the frequency of certain words and phrases in a century of texts digitised by Google books.
Yes, really. That’s the experiment. Fellow historians, I think we have permission to raise an eyebrow. This, Hari says, is “evidence that the world is speeding up, and that process is shrinking our collective attention span.” I think, bluntly, that this is nonsense.
Moreover, the book uses this research to conflate two totally different phenomena: your individual ability to concentrate and the time a culture spends on a topic - best captured in that phrase "9-day wonder", which is old enough to be mentioned by Chaucer.
As I didn't get the chance to raise these matters with Johann in person, I hope others will do it. I see his book as part of a long tradition that registers the pain of cultural and technological change - but over-reaches by telling you this making you ill or stupid.
Does life seem very fast? Is there too much happening? In modernity, the answer to these questions is always yes.
Digital culture has produced its own problems, injustices and inequalities. I think Stolen Focus makes these harder to tackle because its author has cherry-picked and exaggerated to make his points.
But Johann wants us to pay more attention. In this, at least, I agree with him. This thread is me doing that. If we paid more attention, then weak and tendentious arguments with a sprinkle of plausible science would have less traction.
One last thing. Johann is vexed that Facebook doesn't allow you to find out if any of your friends are near you. Some good news for him: it does.
Addendum: Comment from one of the authors of the paper in Nature Communication which Stolen Focus says proves "our collective ability to pay attention is rapidly shrinking”
https://twitter.com/philipplenz6/status/1479486880429355014?s=20
Another addendum
https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/1479578368836313099
Just leaving this here too so all of this is in one place.
https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/1479767056170078208?s=20
I know I said I'd leave this but then I saw this piece in @IrishTimes by @johannhari101 and I think I've found another big problem with Stolen Focus. One that really ought to be fixed with an erratum. irishtimes.com/culture/books/…
The 65 second attention span. Where does this figure come from? Here it is in the opening of Johann's piece. Attention and focus - they're "in freefall".
Here it is in Stolen Focus. It's one of the key bits of research upon which the book depends. "The evidence is stark," it says. Stark.
What does it say in the footnotes? Well, we have a reference about the study, but Johann cites it from a secondary source. A pop science book by Jill Twenge. This strongly suggests he has not read the primary source.
So I thought I would read the primary source. Cost me £20. It's here if you want to read it. And you may not be totally surprised to find that there's rather more to it than Johann suggests. academic.oup.com/joc/article-ab…
The study involved 12 students. Yes, twelve. But the conclusion is not the one that Johann suggests. The researchers think it just as likely that they've discovered evidence for the "perceptual benefits" of multi-tasking with tech. The opposite of the thesis of Stolen Focus.
Sort of serious this, isn't it? This research just isn't about what we commonly understand to be "the attention span" - your actual *ability* to focus. And its conclusions have been misrepresented, probably because Johann hasn't read them.
PS He gets the name wrong here. It's Jean Twenge.
This again. Apologies for being like a stuck record but as you might recall I’ve been a bit disturbed by the alarmism and misleading stats in @johannhari101’s Stolen Focus. But some of his quotes worry me too. Like this in his @guardian piece.
Dr Nigg, an ADHD specialist, says “we need to ask whether we are now developing ‘an attentional pathogenic culture’” Oddly put, isn’t it? So I put it to a British professor in the same field who told me: “Joel … has gone past the evidence or been taken out a context.”
I’ve avoided alluding to Johann’s history of professional malpractice because his plagiarism and misquotation scandal is over a decade ago, but one of its consequences is that he now puts extracts from his interviews on his website.
This very short clip from Joel Nigg is here. If you listen to it, I think Johann’s slightly fuzzy phrasing - Nigg thinks “we may need to ask” - seems more explicable. stolenfocusbook.com/audio/
Because in the clip, he doesn’t say this. As you’ll hear, he says that “some of the people you [JH] have talked to” have described “an attentional pathogenic culture” - a phrase I’d suggest is not very meaningful. (I know a lot of psychologists follow me - maybe you have a view.)
So what can we conclude here? Has Johann “improved” Dr Nigg’s quote here to bolster his argument? Is it really the crescendo of Dr Nigg’s decades of work, as the text of Stolen Focus implies? More questions for Johann and @BloomsburyBooks to discuss, I think.
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