FATAL DISTRACTION
DURING A VISIT TO GRACELAND a while back, the author JOHANN HARI had a meltdown that led him to write one of the more unforgettable books of the last decade. It’s about how we’ve become a bunch of scatterbrains – and what that could mean for the future of humanity.
Hari had taken his godson, ‘Adam’, to Memphis with the aim of snapping the boy out of his obsession with the digital world. The 15-year-old had “dropped out of school and spent almost all his waking hours at home alternating blankly between screens, ” says Hari, who’s speaking to Men’s Health at nearly 1am, London time, but sounds positively exuberant, which he attributes to being heavily caffeinated.
“He was staring either at his phone – an infinite scroll of WhatsApp and Facebook messages – or his iPad, on which he watched a blur of Youtube and porn, ” Hari continues. “He struggled to stay with a topic of conversation for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or veering to another topic. He was an intelligent, decent kid, but it was like nothing could gain any traction in his mind.”
Graceland was one half of a deal that Hari, who is British-Swiss, had struck with Adam: in return for taking him to Elvis’ digs, a place his godson had once longed to visit, Adam promised that for the duration of their trip through the American south he would use his phone only once, at the end of each day. As it turned out, the lure of his device was too strong for Adam to resist. But that’s not what caused Hari’s meltdown. The trigger for that was a ludicrous scene inside Graceland’s Jungle Room (The King’s favourite room, apparently), where Hari overhead a couple marvelling at how they could view the Jungle Room on their iPads. The very room they were inside.
Hari could not stay silent.
“But, sir, ” he said, “we’re here. We’re in the Jungle Room. You don’t have to see it on your screen. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.”
The couple made a hasty, backwards
