Stolen Focus - Johann Hari

 

Introduction Walking in Memphis

• godson: filleul
• freakishly: bizarre
• freak: bête curieuse
• to jabber: bredouiller
• swoosh: sifflement
• blur: trouble
• whirring: ronronner
• shrieking: crieur
• numbing: engourdissant
• baffled: dérouté
• respite: répit
• listlessly: mollement
• wielding: exercer
• ripped: musclé
• to fiddle with: trafiquer
• a slew of: un tas de
• tripwires: fil de détente 
• rickety: bancal

• You are missing your life! you are afraid of missing out - that's why you are checking your screen all the time.
• If we want to do what matters in any domain - any context in life - we have to be able to give attention to the right things... If we can't do that, it's really hard to do anything.
• People who can't focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions.
• But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
• If we wait for perfect evidence, we will be waiting for ever. I had to proceed, doing my best, on the basis of the information we have.

1 Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching and Filtering

• giddy: pris de vertige
• wanker: connard
• twinge: pointe
• sliver: éclat
• pasty: pâle
• bliss: bonheur
• jab: piquer
• poke: pousser
• colicky: qui souffre de coliques
• garbled: confus
• lurch: embardée
• delusion: illusion
• pucker: pincer
• to bristle: se hérisser
• impairment: déficience
• delude: qui se fait des idées 
• hunch: pressentiment
• shrieking: crieur
• rowdy: chahuteur
• bouncer: videur

• I had learned years from social scientists that when it comes to beating any kind of destructive habit, one of the most effective tools we have is called 'pre-commitment'
• Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego - it loves you, it hates you, it's talking to you right now.
• I came to this realization that my job in a way is to think that is different from everyone else - but I was in an environment where I was just getting all the same information as everyone else, and I was just thinking the same things as everyone else.
• It's always tempting to confuse your personal decline for the decline of the human species.
• The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
• The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.
• If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there's no time to reach depth.
• We are, collectively, experiencing a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.
• He stopped using all social media, except Twitter, which he checks only once a week, on Sundays. He stopped watching TV. He read more books instead. 
• I think the first thing you have to realize is it's an ongoing battle.
• In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult. What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offer an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing. I wanted to give myself a chance at choosing something that's more difficult.
• How do you slow down in a world that is speeding up?
• The switch cost effect.
• Is try to get rid of the distractions as much as possible.
• Start slow, but practice, and you'll get there.

2 Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States

• crippling: paralysie
• lurch: embardée
• beak: bec
• cursory: rapide
• puffy: bouffi
• miser: avare
• paltry: dérisoire
• funk: cafard
• sagging: distendu
• squalid: sordide
• enthralling: captivant
• gusher: puits jaillissant
• off-kilter: de travers
• frak out: crises
• stumps: souches
• thawing: fondant
• slough off: se dépouiller
• taunt: sarcasme
• blissful: bienheureux 

• Narcissism is a corruption of attention - it's where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.
• Like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday.
• No stranger is going to flood you with hearts and tell you you're great.
• He discovered that he felt most alive when he was doing something difficult.
• Years later, the designers of Instagram asked: If we reinforce our users taking selfies - if we give them hearts and likes - will they start to do it obsessively, just like the pigeon will obsessively hold out its left wing to get extra sed? They know Skinner's core techniques, and applied them to a billon people.
• For the artist, when they were in the process of creation, time seems to fall away.
• But creative people seemed mostly uninterested in rewards; even money didn't interest most of them.
• Staying in the flow.
• The first thing you need to do is choose a clearly defined goal, and to set aside other goals while you do.
• So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.
• We should primarily focus on the things that make life worth living, and finds way to boost them.
• The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.
• It was like the flow was relaxing my body and opening my mind - perhaps because I knew I had done my best.
• I realised then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.

3 Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion

• hunched: regroupé
• bunch: vouté
• jangling: tintement
• lull: bercer
• pass out: tomber dans les pommes
• darting: fléchette
• stagger: chanceler
• funk: avoir le cafard
• douse: arroser
• coked out: tomber en rade
• unclenching: détendre
• to crave: brûler d'envie de faire
• lapse: écart
• drowsy: endormi
• bone-tired: extrêmement fatigué
• knackered: claqué
• to fall apart: s'effondre
• brink: bord
• bereavement: perte d'un être cher
• roadkill: cadavre d'animal écrasé sur la route
• to amp up: amplifier

• Then I would try to stop my mind jangling as it ran through all the things that had happened that day, and all the things I would need to do when I woke up, and all the things to worry about in the world.
• Local sleep: in this state, you believe you are alert and competent - but you aren't. You are sitting at your desk and you look awake, but parts of your brain are asleep.
• If you sleep less, your attention will likely suffer.
• I'm going to make you want more fast food, I'm going to make you want more sugar for quick energy.
• When we sleep, our minds start to identify connections an patterns from what we've experienced during the day.
• Sommeil réparateur: when we sleep better, a lot of problem get less - like mood disorders, like obesity, like concentration problems...It repairs a lot of damage.
• One of the things that happens is that during sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day.
• That can explain why, when you are tired, "you get a hung-over sort of feeling" - you are literally closed up with toxins.
• When you dream , you can revisit stressful moments, but without stress hormones flooding your system.
• Our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.
• You need to radically limit your exposure to light before you go to sleep. He believes you should have no sources of artificial light in your bedroom at all, and you should avoid the blue light of screens for at least two hours before you go to bed.
• Many of the things we need to do are so obvious they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more.

4 Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading

• tangy: acidulé
• dashing: se précipiter
• glibly: facilement
• vituperative: durement critique
• nuggets: pépites
• hunches: pressentiment
• to pore over: examiner
• sliver: morceau

• Most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book.
• "screen inferiority"
• "The medium is the message"
• The way information gets to you is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it's about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once.
• I Like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I sped a lot of time on social media.
• When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it's like to be inside another person's head.
• The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other peoples's emotions. Reading non-fiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.
• Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgable, but it doesn't have this empathy-expanding effect.
• Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

5 Cause Five: The Disruption of Mind-Wandering

• squiggle: gribouiller
• skimming: effleurer
• whirr: bruit
• oboe: hautbois
• clucking: caqueter
• crude: brut
• snarky: narquois

• So we aren't just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus - we are facing a crisis of lost-mind-wandering.
• In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be gift, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.

6 Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Part One)

• glee: joie
• whim: lubie
• cuddly: en peluche
• grab: saisir
• enthusing: s'enthousiasmer
• ruction: grabuge
• inescapable: inévitable
• paintbrush: pinceau
• sliver: tranche fine
• thwacked: frapper fort

• If you are stuck in gloomy weather for a long time, you are more likely to be depressed.
• If you want to shape the user's behavior, make sure he gets hearts and likes right away. Using these principles, they launched a new app of heir own. They name Instagram.
• Whenever he looked at a new message, he found it took him a long time to get his mind back to where it had been before.
• At Google, the success was measured by what was called "engagement" - which was defined as minutes and hours of eyeballs on the product. More engagement was good; less engagement was bad. This was for a simple reason. The longer you make people look at their phones, the more advertising they see - and therefore the more money Google gets.
• They spend a lot of their own time meditating and doing yoga. They often ban their own kids from using the sites and gadgets they design, and send them instead to tech-free Montessori schools. But their business model can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society.
• Everything is a race for attention.
• Today, all social media and lots of other sites use a version of infinite scroll. They seemed to be unable to pull themselves away from their devices.
• Infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time on sites like Twitter. 
• One of the ironies is there are these incredibly popular workshops at Facebook and Google about mindfulness - about creating the mental space to make decisions non-reactively - and they are also the biggest perpetrators of non-mindfulness in the world.
• How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?

7 Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Part Two)

• maiden: vierge
• creepier: horreur
• ghoulish: macabre
• startingly: incroyablement
• billboard: panneau publicitaire
• bogus: faux
• whirr: bruissement
• quirk: excentricité
• indignant: indigné
• enraging: rendre fou de colère
• fury: fureur
• mercy: démence
• bereft: perdu
• prickling: picotement
• cunning: malin
• gleeful: joyeux

• The way our tech currently works - and why it is undermining our attention.
• Facebook makes more money for every extra second you are starting through a screen at their site, and they lose money every time you put the screen down.
• Every time you send a message or status update on Facebook, or Snapshot or Twitter, and every time you search for something on Google, everything you say is being scanned and sorted and stored.
• 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 not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home.
• The technical term for this system - coined by the brillant Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff - is "surveillance capitalism".
• Imagine if I could predict all of your actions in chess before you made them. It would be trivial for me to dominate you. That's what is happening on a human scale now.
• In 2017 The European Union blocked some forms of tracking of internet users - they can't scan your Gmail any more in that territory.
• Their business model is screen time, not the time.
• The phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold your attention.
• The way our tech works now to corrode our attention was and remains a choice.
• The real debate is what tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?
• That what you see is selected for you according to an algorithm.
• It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen. Remember: the more time you look, the more money they made.
• On average, we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm.
• "Negativity biais"
• If it's more enraging, it's more engaging.
• It's very hard to be with the reality, the physical world, the built world - because it doesn't offer as frequent and as immediate rewards as this thing does.
• You'll break away from your work and your relationships to seek a sweet, sweet hit of retweets.
• At the moment false claims spread on social media far faster than the truth, because of the algorithms that spread outraging material faster and further.
• Just like Facebook, YouTube makes more money the longer you watch.
• No matter where you start, you end up more crazy.
• Just watching YouTube radicalises people.
• When Bolsonaro unexpectedly won the presidency, his supporters chanted "Facebook! Facebook! Facebook!". They knew what the algorithms had done for them.
• There's a destination we want to get to, and most of the time, it doesn't actually get us there - it takes us off track.
• The collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.
• If we can't focus, what possible hope do we have to solve global warming?
• How, in practice, do we change the machinery that is stealing our attention?

Cause Seven: The Rise of Cruel Optimism (or: Why Individual Changes are an important Start, But Not Enough)

• buff: musclé
• conceivable: concevable
• prickling: piquant
• beholden: redevable
• fiendishly: diablement
• upbeat: enjoué

• Nir Eyal - Indistractible
• The goal, Nir says is to create a craving in human beings - and he cites B.F. Skinner as a model for how to do it. Want to hook your users? Drive them crazy.
• In my life, I had something that felt like it controlled me, and I controlled it.
• Persuasive technology.
• All of us have "internal triggers" - moments in our lives that push us to give in to bad habits.
• When I'm writing - it's never come easy. It's always difficult.
• An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state. It's all about avoidance. It's all about - how do I get out of this uncomfortable state?
• So whenever he felt that pickling feeling or boredom or stress come to him, he identified what was happening, and picked up a pack of Post-It notes, and he wrote on it what he wanted to know. Later when he had finished a good stretch of writing, he would let himself google it - but only then.
• How about planning your day. We just let our time to be usurped by the news or whatever's on Twitter or whatever's happening in the world outside us, as opposed to saying - actually what do I want to do with my time?
• But there was something about what he said that made me feel uncomfortable, and for a while, I couldn't articulate it.
• Cruel optimism.
• Your stress comes from a failure to be mindful.
• While at first glance, cruel optimism seems kind and optimistic, it often has an ugly after-effect.
• It whispers: the problem isn't in the system: the problem is in you.
• This is one of the problems with cruel optimism - it takes exceptional cases, usually achieved in exceptional circumstances, and acts as if they can be commonplace.
• Almost all the existing books about attention problems present them simply as individual flaws requiring individual tweaks.
• We could have used government policy to make fresh, nutritious food cheap and accessible, and sugar-filled junk expensive and inaccessible. 
• You can try having self-control, but there a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.
• It's authentic optimism. This is where you honestly acknowledge the barriers that stand in the way of your goal and establish a plan to work together with other people to dismantle those barriers, step by step.

9 The First Glimpses of the Deeper Solution

• benevolent: bienveillant
• clamouring: clameur
• innocuous: inoffensif
• conceivable: concevable
• screwing: visser
• disingeneous: peu sincère
• fiendishly: diaboliquement
• daunted: intimidé
• thwarting: faire obstacle 
• fracking: fracturer

• If we are going to find a lasting solution, we need to go right to the root cause of the problem.
• What's going on there is it's catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.
• Since there's evidence YouTube's recommendation engine is radicalising people.
• How these sites could be redesigned to make it easier for you to restrain yourself and think about your longer-term goals.
• Social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder.
• Facebook: Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness and if left unchecked, the site would continue to pump its users with more and more divisive content in an effort to get user attention and increase time on the platform.
• Facebook's scientists concluded her was one solution: they said Facebook would have to abandon its current business model.
• The huge forces stealing our focus.
• We are only at the start of what unregulated surveillance capitalism will do to us. It is only going to be more sophisticated and more invasive.
• Facebook, in 2015, filed a patent for technology that will be able to detect your emotions from the cameras on your laptop and phone.