The Fight for Our Attention
We may live in an endlessly distracted world, but where we focus our gaze still matters: Your weekly guide to the best in books
In one early scene in Lauren Oyler’s novel Fake Accounts, the narrator snoops through her boyfriend’s phone. His apps are arranged in an unfamiliar way, and looking with fresh eyes makes all the colorful options—a camera, an internet browser, two ride-sharing services—immediately overwhelming. “The effect was to prevent the eye from focusing without exactly exhausting it either, making you feel that you were seeing too much and nothing at all,” she observedin a section of the.
