Are attention spans actually shortening?
Are attention spans actually shortening?
So a view I see a lot nowadays is that attention spans are getting shorter, especially when it comes to younger generations. And the growing success of short form content on Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter for example seems to support this claim. I have a friend in their early 20s who regularly checks their phone (sometimes scrolling Tiktok content) as we're watching a film. And an older colleague recently was pleased to see me reading a book, because he felt that anyone my age and younger was less likely to want to invest the time in reading.
But is this actually true on the whole? Does social media like Tiktok really mould our interests and alter our attention? In some respects I can see how it could change our expectations. If we've come to expect a webpage to load in seconds, it can be frustrating when we have to wait minutes. But to someone that was raised with dial-up, perhaps that wouldn't be as much of an issue. In the same way, if a piece of media doesn't capture someone in the first few minutes they may be more inclined to lose focus because they're so used to quick dopamine hits from short form content. Alternatively, maybe this whole argument is just a 'kids these days' fallacy. Obviously there are plenty of young adults that buck this trend.
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i remember Michael Stevens saying in an interview with Anthony Padilla that the subway surfers gameplay concept isnt really new and we've been doing the same thing for ages, rather than subway surfers while listening to some bot read reddit posts, people were listening to their friends while looking at birds or animals at a zoo, or even getting heavily intoxicated to help converse with your friends.
and people have said that people are getting dumber but i think theyre just young let them grow up then compare. we have been laughing at stupid ass jokes, shitty songs and toilet humour since the beginning of time.
people from the 13th century might be saying that we're lazy for not making our clothes by and settling for an inferior product made by machines, but in the grand scheme, does it really matter that much?
When my mom was a kid, her grandpa would often watch/listen to the TV, while listening to the radio, and watch out the window and announce who was driving down the road in front of their farm by recognizing their vehicles. Nobody considered it brain rot, his family considered it a skill he had.