Hair: reading notes and analysis

Reading Notes for Hari

Hari, Johann. “Your Attention Didn\\\\\\\'t Collapse. It Was Stolen.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2 Jan. 2022, www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media.

Johann Hari was a former columnist for the Independent, but his career failed when he was called out for lying and manipulating facts in order to advance his own journalistic status. He then wrote a book about drugs and addiction and has been writing for the Guardian since (Aitkenhead). The Guardian is a British daily newspaper with a strong web presence.

Hari’s main claim is that addiction is a problem for most people but especially young people attached to their screens and social media apps like YouTube and Snapchat. They are missing out on reality because of their screen addictions. To support this claim, Hari uses personal anecdotes (his experience going to Graceland with his nephew Adam), expert opinion (he travels to Portland to talk to Professor Joel Nigg). He also speaks to James Williams, former Google engineer, who says that the issue is a social problem and that to fix it society itself needs to become less attached to technology.

A key concept in the article is the “social epidemic” concept. It is used to explain the phenomenon of addiction to phones, screens, and technology in the same way obesity is a problem: it is not a medical epidemic but a social epidemic—i.e., a result of environmental factors that need to be changed to address the issue.