Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.

In this final episode, he considers where our media consumption might be headed. Many are concerned about smartphone addiction and a disintegration of public discourse, but others see a brighter future and our current times as a turning point to a world where the capacities of technology are used to benefit of society.

Matthew speaks to a former tech engineer who has become a philosopher and activist on attention, a historian who believes that our current era has many precedents, a psychologist who is wary of headlines about collapsed attention spans and a behavioural economist who can see a way that our society will adapt to the digital world.

Contributors:

James Williams, author of Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

Presenter: Matthew Syed

Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.

In this episode Matthew traces the inexorable rise of shortform video and investigates its success. He asks what the increasing popularity of this type of media might mean for our attention and finds out about the people using for purposes that may have surprised Neil Postman.

Apps such as Tik Tok, Youtube and Snapchat are ubiquitous and for many have become the chief way that they consume media. What does watching shorter videos mean for the content, and how do these apps change our habits and possibly, our brains?

The popularity of this medium has driven traditional institutions that are concerned with public affairs to embrace shortform video. So what's the result? Matthew finds out.

Contributors:

Dr Zoetanya Sujon, University of the Arts London

Presenter: Matthew Syed

Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.

In this episode, Matthew analyses the medium through which we consume so much our media, the smartphone, and asks how whether it changes the nature of how we read, watch and interpret the world around us.

Matthew looks into the culture of smartphone use around the world and finds out what we can interpret from the growing use of the devices, particularly among younger generations. He looks into the technological advancements in the smartphone that have driven the most change, and considers how information consumption on a phone changes our approach to attention as opposed to the television or a book.

Contributors:

Gloria Mark, Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine and author of Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life

Presenter: Matthew Syed

Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.

In this episode, Matthew looks into history to uncover different approaches to focus. He finds out where the idea of 'attention' came from, whether there has always been a fear that humanity's ability to focus was declining, and what the historical relationship of technology to distraction has been.

He hears from the historian of science D Graham Burnett. Burnett has explored different philosophies of attention across the ages and is an advocate for a change in behaviours regarding our attention today. Professor Nilli Lavie, of University College London's Attention Research Laboratory, provides an insight into modern scientific views of attention.

Matthew looks for answers in a community renowned for their ability to focus...monks. Historian Jamie Kreiner has uncovered how early Christian monks thought about distraction in her book 'The Wandering Mind'. Jamie reveals that there is more to connect the monks of the first millennia with our technological world today than we might think.

Presenter: Matthew Syed

Matthew Syed asks what it means to be distracted in a media world vying for our attention.

In this first episode, he seeks answers in the work of the media theorist and educator Neil Postman. Forty years ago Postman wrote 'Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business'. Postman feared that the rise of television had created a world where the image became more important than information, and that democracy was in danger to becoming entertainment.

Postman cited the author Aldous Huxley as a key influence. Huxley's novel 'Brave New World' depicts a World State where citizens are engineered to focus on pleasure rather than the challenges of life and society. Huxley feared that tyranny may appear not through censorship, but due to "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

Matthew speaks to Andrew Postman, Neil Postman's son, and Aldous Huxley's biographer Uwe Rasch, to ask what the ideas of the two writers might mean for us today, in a world where media and entertainment are at our fingertips 24/7. Has the prophecy of either Postman or Huxley come to pass?

Presenter: Matthew Syed

We all know the power of a great love story. In films, literature, television - a “happy ending” is shorthand for the main characters coupling up at the end. But are these romantic aspirations really a key ingredient for a happy and fulfilled life?

Matthew Syed explores the idea that you can be long term single, and happy.

Social scientist Bella DePaulo always knew that marriage wasn’t for her. At 70 years-old, she is happily single, and always has been. She’s spent her career researching, writing and speaking on the single experience, in an effort to dismantle the conventional wisdom that a happy, fulfilled life, means a coupled-up one.

Matthew speaks to Yale sociologist and PhD candidate Hannah Tessler about her research into the complex, expansive relationship networks of single people.

We also hear from David Bather Wood, an Assistant Professor from the University Warwick, who explains how a philosophical parable about porcupines, dating back to the 1830s, influenced contemporary understandings of the choice to live a single life.

Presenter: Matthew Syed

In the 1960s and 70s, Maisie Barrett and Noel Gordon were two black British children wrongly labelled as “educationally subnormal”. They were sent to schools where children were never taught to read or write.

They’re just two examples of a scandal that affected hundreds of children in the UK, one that has never been officially acknowledged.

As adults, Noel and Maisie made a surprising discovery - they were both dyslexic. And with that diagnosis came a profound reimagining of themselves and what had happened to them.

Matthew Syed considers the relationship between ableism, racism and eugenics - concepts with roots that stretch back centuries and which continue to have a profound impact on society today.

With Maisie Barrett, Noel Gordon, sociologist Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis, Assistant Professor Dr Robert Chapman, and occupational therapist Jenny Okolo.

Presenter: Matthew Syed

As a teenager, Raven Saunders dreamt of playing basketball, but their physique led them down a different path. Exceptional strength and size destined them for shot put, ultimately earning them a place on the US track and field team.

In 2021, amid the pandemic, Raven became known for their choice of distinctive protective masks at competitions. But the day they chose to wear a mask of The Incredible Hulk, they not only captured the world's attention, but they also showed hidden parts of themselves.

Throughout history, masks have served various roles including spiritual, entertainment, and protective purposes. Since we’ve all been reacquainted with masks in recent years thanks to COVID-19, Matthew Syed explores how masks have the power to reveal more than they conceal and examines how these coverings, while ostensibly meant to protect, can also become powerful symbols of personal and cultural expression.

With American shot putter Raven “The Hulk” Saunders, mask maker and psychodrama therapist Mike Chase, and Professor of International Politics at Loughborough University Aidan McGarry.

If you are suffering distress or despair, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline

Presenter: Matthew Syed

A Novel production for BBC Radio 4.

Jen Simonic and Masey Kaplan have bonded over a mutual love for knitting for decades.

In 2022, the pair of avid knitters decided to search for strangers to help finish an incomplete blanket their bereaved friend’s mother had started. It kickstarted a movement of ‘finishers’ - people around the world who complete the half-knitted works left behind by others. Their concept challenges the idea that we are successful only when we finish what we start, an idea entrenched in our present culture.

Matthew Syed traces the psychological roots of valuing completion and explores alternative outlooks that subvert the merits of finishing. He hears remarkable stories that reveal beautiful possibilities in leaving creative work half-done and asks whether reappraising the unfinished can enable an imaginative process to unfold, connect people more deeply to one another and even ease grief.

With Loose Ends founders, Jen Simonic and Masey Kaplan, their friend Patty Gardner, artist and composer Jan Hendrickse and Nina Collins, daughter of filmmaker Kathleen Collins.

Featuring excerpts from Nafas ar Rahman, commissioned by the MUSARC Choir.

Presenter: Matthew Syed

When astronauts journeyed to the moon in the early 1970s, few were paying attention to the psychological impact of the experience. Yet many among those who have left the Earth’s boundary say it is extraordinary and life-changing. They experience a cognitive shift known as the "overview effect".

Matthew ponders the potential of staring down at Earth for our collective good and charts how, decades on, the overview effect has found its place at the heart of space tourism. He also delves into the unlikely religious roots and moral complexity behind the billionaires striving to make it possible for humans to live in space one day.

With former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, new astronaut Ed Dwight, Space Philosopher and author Frank White, Anthropologist of Space and Religion, Deana Weibel, Professor of Religion at Knox College Robert Geraci and former ISRO scientist, Jijith Nadumari Ravi.

Presenter: Matthew Syed