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Are attention spans actually shortening? (feddit.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by OmegaMouse@feddit.uk to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] Anchorite@lemm.ee 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Yes behaviourally, no empirically.

You get a positive dopamine reactive from viewing multiple short form content pieces in succession, you get an arguably more valuable serotonin reaction from viewing a more in depth piece and maybe feeling like you learned something.

How you’re affected by these feelings of satisfaction will influence your behaviour. I recently compared mine and my wife’s weekends, she’d watched a lot of short form content and couldn’t remember a thing, felt empty from it, I’d watched a series of a tv show and could talk about the story and concepts.

But that’s not all there is to it, Plato argued that the written world would dumb people down because they no longer had to remember things and pass them on vocally, maybe a decrease in the requirement for individual cognition, but obviously an overall good.

Edit: edit was messing with me so I couldn’t add this til now. I’m just a drunk guy enjoying dinner and browsing Lemmy, what you’re looking for is the simple answer, the dopamine hit, a minimal conversation. Put your attention span to the test and look into some open access research on the subject, it’ll be fun! And its all that seperate us from the YouTubers that we venerate so much

[–] Dasnap@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

I do find it funny that people generally seem to be viewing shorter videos, whereas I often don't want to start a video shorter than 20 minutes. I've been watching a lot of Cathode Ray Dude and those videos have girth.

It's also funny that YouTube tried to kill off short videos a decade ago and are now desperately trying to roll that back.

[–] OmegaMouse@feddit.uk 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some great points! So you think that people's capacity for attention hasn't changed, but the types of media we're exposed nowadays to can encourage us to change our behaviour toward consuming short form content? But if that content wasn't available, they could happily move back toward longer form content?

I do agree that short dopamine hits do make me feel good in the moment, but hollow after the fact. Longer, informative content does lodge itself more into my brain and provide longer lasting feelings of reward.

[–] Anchorite@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I think that’s about right, our capacity hasn’t changed this quickly, just the menu has changed to suit a quick fix appetite.

People can and will still focus on longer form content, but maybe that’s their day job, so they want a bit of a release from in depth activity or ‘important’ information.

I think there is a real danger here in some form… think about how you’d answer the question ‘what did you do on the weekend?’ That could easily be nothing or it could be I watched a great series called severance that explored the concepts of labour and our work and home lives as human beings

[–] WarmSoda@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's pretty interesting how there really wasn't any written records for thousands of years. Entire religions and, as in Plato's time, whole schools of thought just weren't written down except for a few students notes.

Obviously time and decay factor into it, but there seems to be a culture shift at a certain point that more people decided to record things other than taxes and itemization.

I argue that the written word is our greatest invention. Without it we'd be back to square one every other generation.

[–] Anchorite@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Yep, that’s the root of the ‘how long do you spend thinking about the Roman Empire?’ Meme right?

It’s some of the earliest popular records of reflexive thought and philosophy, available to us because it was recorded, and still the same shit we’re struggling with right now