Johann Hari

Authors & Journalists · Stolen Focus (book)

Journalist whose book Stolen Focus ties the collapse of children's unsupervised play to the same engineered attention crisis driving compulsive screen use.

Johann Hari is a journalist whose 2022 book Stolen Focus investigates why sustained attention has become so hard to come by, for children and adults alike. Drawing on interviews with researchers, technologists, and affected families, he argues that the shrinking of unstructured, unsupervised childhood play is itself a casualty of the always-on attention economy — not a side effect, but part of the same engineered problem as compulsive phone and app use. The book connects declining attention spans to the design choices of the platforms driving them, and to what children in particular have lost as a result.