Moment 53 - Why Doing This Is More Important Than Ever Before: Johann Hari

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Johann Hari, is the man behind multiple bestselling books speculating on depression, anxiety, happiness, and loneliness. In this clip, we talk about the important role spending time reading plays in our lives. We are so absorbed in the information that we see across social media because of the short and fast forms they are presented to us in. Whether that’s twitter posts or Instagram captions, the medium of these messages make us impatient when it comes to reading a book. Johann calls it screen inferiority which diminishes our ability to retain information. He explains that instead of skimming (or scrolling) across loads of things, we need to take a bit of time to think about one thing. Slowing down, looking at one bit and spending time thinking about what you are actually reading is how we are going to increase our engagement. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/9vzo9qSXdpb Johann - https://twitter.com/johannhari101?lang=en https://www.instagram.com/johann.hari/ Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  Why is reading so important? What role does reading play? We all consume information digitally now. Why do we need to go back to reading stuff?

• 0:11Johann Hari?

  There's a few reasons. And it's not, again, not a snooty thing at all. So you're absolutely right that reading is mass, reading books has massively declined. Fifty seven percent of Americans now never read a book in any given year. It's the first time in the history of the American Republic that's the case. We're, we're still a bit better than that in Britain, but not, not by much. And there's several people who really helped me to understand this and what that, what that's doing to us. That's partly a symptom of our declining attention and partly a cause of it. And I'll talk a bit about how. So I interviewed a woman called Professor Anne Mangon, who's at Stavanger University in Norway, who's a professor of literacy and probably the leading expert in the world on, on these questions. She explained lots of things, but there's one very simple one.

• 0:54Johann Hari?

  You can do studies, there've been loads of studies showing this now. So you get good people, you split them randomly into two. The first group, let's say you could do it with my book. You give one group of people my book on the iPad, like your iPad there. And the other group, you give the physical book, right? And then you go back to them a week, a month, a year later, and you just ask them questions about the book. And it turns out invariably, the people who've read it on the screen remember significantly less and understand significantly less of what they read. This is a very well proven effect. It's called screen inferiority. It's such a big effect that if you take a 10 year old child, it's the equivalent of two thirds of their progress in reading in a year is lost when they're reading on a screen. That's how, that's how much it diminishes our ability to think.

• 1:39Johann Hari?

  And it seems to be, there's lots of, there's a big debate about why. But when you read, let's say, you know, we opened the BBC News site now and you and me read the same story. When we read on a screen, what we tend to do is read in a sort of skimming Z pattern. You sort of skim keywords, right? Boom, boom, boom.

• 2:01Johann Hari?

  When you read a book, generally, we read linearly. We read from left to right, you know, and you keep going. But part of the problem is if you spend too much time reading on screens, when you read a book, you start doing that when you read books, and it screws with your ability to read books. But the truth is, I think it's something more subtle, right? So there's this, Marshall McLuhan was this kind of professor in the 60s, who said this famous thing that I never understood for years. He said, the medium is the message, right? And what he meant was, when a new medium comes along, he was talking about television. So a new way of telling stories and thinking about the world comes along. You know, you could tell on your television and you can watch The Wire, or Wheel of Fortune, or anything in between, right? The medium of television itself has

• 2:44Johann Hari?

  a message in it, right? Irrespective of the show you're watching on the television. So the medium of television, the message is, the world is very fast, it's all happening at the same time. We can all think about things you get from watching TV, the way you feel, if you want, and I love TV, things you feel when you, when you watch TV. But I think there's a medium in the message of social media, right? So let's think about Twitter. When you open Twitter, doesn't matter if you're Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or I know Bubba the Love Spud, right? There is a message you are absorbing about how the world should be. I would say the message is, firstly, the world should be interpreted and thought about very quickly, right? Quick, quick, quick. It should be interpreted very

• 3:29Johann Hari?

  briefly. Anything worth saying can be said in very short little bursts. It's binary. Exactly. And what matters, the thing that is most important is whether people immediately agree with this very fast, very short thing you've said, right? That is the message hidden in the medium of Twitter, right? Think about Instagram. What's the message hidden in the medium of Instagram? It's, what really matters is whether you look good, and whether people like how you look, right? That's it. That's the message. What's the message in Facebook? The message is, okay, friendship, which is the most precious human thing, friendship is looking at other people's photographs of their life, that

• 4:09Johann Hari?

  you should narrate your life to your friends through images, and crave their likes, and that that's what friendship is, mutually watching each other's carefully collected paparazzi images of each other, and liking them. Now-

• 4:24Johann Hari?

  I think all those messages are wrong. That is a terrible way to live your life, right? It is not true that life should be interpreted quickly. The one, actually, if people immediately agree with what you're saying, what you're saying probably didn't need to be said at all, right? Yeah, I like pretty people, Instagram, fine, okay. But if that's the thing that you overweight your life towards, something's really gone wrong. And friendship, a true friendship is nothing like a Facebook friendship. But think about the message. The reason I say some relation to reading is think about the message in the book, right? The printed book, what does a printed book say to you? Firstly, the world is complicated. And you might want to take a good bit of time to think about one thing.

• 5:07Johann Hari?

  Secondly, it says, you should slow down. Slow down. Look at this thing that will be saying the same thing 100 years from now as it says right now. Right? And thirdly, it says, you might want to spend time thinking about the inner lives of other people. Because the inner lives of other people are really interesting. And you'll find that they're like you in some ways and unlike you in others, right? So I would say, take care what technologies you absorb. Because over time, your consciousness will come to resemble those technologies. You know, you want to have had a life of meaning and purpose, where you engage with complex things, where you showed empathy, where you showed love. These are not, these are things that the current model of social media absolutely militates against.

• 5:52Johann Hari?

  And the books help with, they don't, they're not the, you know, they're not the sole solution. There's lots of things going on. But I deeply believe in the medium of the book.