[HN Gopher] Have attention spans been declining?
___________________________________________________________________
Have attention spans been declining?
Author : janandonly
Score : 376 points
Date : 2023-07-24 17:43 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slimemoldtimemold.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slimemoldtimemold.com)
| svnt wrote:
| The data by age show a consistent decline in attention: 34 to 55
| year-olds were significantly lower than either 18 to 34 or 55+
|
| This is interesting because it fits with none of the hypotheses
| and none is suggested. What could it be? To me it suggests that
| working and/or raising children have negative impacts on
| attention span.
| tamimio wrote:
| [flagged]
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| I'm calling it: in 5 years mails will be read in bullet point
| summaries based on the actual formal email which the sender has
| an AI write from quick notes.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I saw "attention" and thought LLMs and realised that it is about
| people.
|
| Attention of machines been increasing while people's attention
| span is decreasing.
| substation13 wrote:
| Anyone else read the headline and go straight through to the
| comments?
|
| I think that HN, which has added deliberate friction elsewhere on
| the site, should consider hiding the comments link until you have
| clicked through to the article.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| I listened to this podcast over the weekend on NPR's "How I Build
| This" (tho it's from early to mid 2022). It's an interview with
| Johann Hari, the author of "Stolen Focus". The book sounds like
| it's worth a go, even at close to 400 pages!??!?
|
| https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-hib...
|
| https://stolenfocusbook.com/
| crooked-v wrote:
| I immediately think of the immediate and endless marketing spam
| notifications that are a result of daring to allow an app like
| Uber to send push notifications at all.
| tamaharbor wrote:
| What?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| IDK. There was no tl;dr, and copy/pasting to chatgtp for a
| summary is too much work on a page that long. I guess I'll never
| know.
| ldehaan wrote:
| [dead]
| psychlops wrote:
| By what percent?
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| TLDR.
| napierzaza wrote:
| [dead]
| bizzleDawg wrote:
| I may be reading this incorrectly, but in the article, the 65%
| appears to be authors confidence in the statement that attention
| spans appear to be declining, as denoted by the sub-script.
| Whereas in the HN title it reads as if it's saying a "65% decline
| in attention span".
|
| Various other assertions in the post also have sub-script
| confidences associated e.g. "my guess: yes90%".
|
| I could totally believe that there has been a 65% decline in
| attention span. "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari certainly makes 65%
| seem conservative!
| lolinder wrote:
| Context since this has now been fixed: the original title as
| submitted was "Have attention spans been declining? - Yes,
| 65%". The bit after the dash was erroneously added by the
| submitter and was not part of the article's actual title.
| bizzleDawg wrote:
| Yep, fixed now. Thanks
| billfor wrote:
| The article was long so the 65% was the TLDR summary. For
| people like me with no attention span it was very helpful.
| lolinder wrote:
| But as OP mentions, the 65% as printed in the title
| conveyed the false impression that there's been a 65%
| decline in attention spans, whereas the actual tl;dr should
| have been this sentence from the end:
|
| > It seems likely to me that individual attention spans
| have declined (I'd give it ~70%), but I wouldn't be
| surprised if the decline was relatively small, noisy &
| dependent on specific tests.
| DelightOne wrote:
| How do you deal with too much information if not by reducing
| the attention span anyway? There is no time to focus, no?
| JohnFen wrote:
| You develop the skill of quickly determining what deserves
| your attention and what does not. Having a long attention
| span doesn't imply you give _everything_ your full attention.
| DelightOne wrote:
| How does that make you feel good compared to reading a
| couple short feel-good or activating short articles?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Whereas in the HN title it reads as if it's saying a "65%
| decline in attention span".
|
| Perhaps the submitter's attention span ran out.
| notahacker wrote:
| For related reasons, I like the blog's claim that much of the
| difficulty in establishing whether the proposition is true or
| not is because none of the wealth of literature on attention
| span was in the form of long term studies. Perhaps the
| researchers got bored and moved on to something else!
| civilitty wrote:
| [flagged]
| fikama wrote:
| I know that HN is maybe not a place for such comments, but I
| strongly belive we need to make "attention span overflow" a
| thing
| n0on3 wrote:
| (I'm not sure if you were joking or not and I know it's
| probably not in the same spirit you intended it here / a
| bit OT but...) I've been using literally that exact
| expression for a while to describe the situation in which,
| during somewhat complex discussions within a group, in
| order to not be perceived as jerks participants are forced
| to follow an unnecessarily long, repetitive, trivial and
| most often also completely pointless "line of reasoning"
| just to have their own attention completely derailed from
| any productive/actually-interesting argument anyone was
| trying to make, often ultimately resulting in giving up
| because recalling those lost mental threads is by then even
| more difficult and there is only so much mental energy (for
| you and collectively) to dedicate to that discussion.
|
| Just saying, imho it's already a thing (with different
| incarnations in different contexts).
| progmetaldev wrote:
| This is definitely a thing, but at least in my
| experience, it is also a thing that narcissists do. They
| can dig up emails and examples from the dark caverns
| where you were just having a water cooler chat, and they
| somehow took it as very serious and something you should
| have meant to defend if it left your lips.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Was this a joke? The mega sentence would seem to be
| perfect example of your point.
| episiarch wrote:
| I didn't even have the attention span to unpack your
| first sentence.
| cafeinux wrote:
| They said: When many words said, no listen more, so say
| "attention span overflow" instead of yawn.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I got what they were saying...
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning that book. I am trying to decide if it's
| worth reading. The negative reviews agree with the main premise
| of the book but say it's short and superficial. Is there
| information in there worth reading beyond the usual tips ie
| keeping your phone in another room, avoid news first thing in
| the morning, no screen time 2 hours before bed, long cardio
| workouts, etc?
| russfink wrote:
| "Short and superficial" is appropriate for a book that
| discusses shortened attention spans! ;-)
| bizzleDawg wrote:
| I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a practical title,
| though there are a few practical tips along the lines you
| mention, the point of the book is more about the societal
| problem than the individual. But as someone who gets highly
| frustrated with my inability to focus on occasion, I would
| say it's reasonably cathartic.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Thank you. I'm going to pass on this one
| fredoliveira wrote:
| It is more about highlighting the issues than it is about
| outlining specific fixes, honestly. But i thoroughly enjoyed
| it.
| matthewowen wrote:
| You should look at Matthew Sweet's responses to that book,
| it's not pretty: https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/14
| 7912591249084826...
|
| It's also worth noting that Johann Hari has an extensive
| history as a liar.
| bizzleDawg wrote:
| TIL. Thank you
| burkaman wrote:
| Thanks for this comment, yes this title is wrong and should be
| changed. The article's conclusion is:
|
| > It seems likely to me that individual attention spans have
| declined (I'd give it ~70%), but I wouldn't be surprised if the
| decline was relatively small, noisy & dependent on specific
| tests.
| niplav wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a probability attached to that
| statement.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It would be nice if HN titles _actually_ had to match
| submission titles.
| lmm wrote:
| It would be nice if they either did or didn't. The current
| system where submitters are encouraged to carefully choose a
| title and moderators are encouraged to stomp on it is the
| worst of both worlds.
| mbesto wrote:
| Relax, dang usually fixes them anyway
| intelVISA wrote:
| 35% of the time at least
| thecolorblew wrote:
| I have 35% confidence in this
| karaterobot wrote:
| Disagree. Article titles on the web are often very bad. Often
| this is for clickbait reasons, but also frequently just
| because the author was not writing for the HN front page as
| their audience. Almost always, I prefer the rewritten
| headlines on HN. However, this seems labor intensive to
| accomplish, and there is usually a delay before the edited
| title appears. What I wish is for article submitters to
| consider the use case, and rewrite the headline to conform to
| HN guidelines on submission.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| They are often updated to reflect the link title, in cases
| where the title by the submitter isn't great.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| There are some good reasons this isn't the case. Often the
| submission title itself has something wrong in it, or is
| click-bait-y, or just needs some pointless fat trimmed from
| it to get to the point.
|
| It's definitely not black and white.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| But if the source can't get the title right in a clean and
| objective sort or way, isn't that a signal for "there's got
| to be a better source"? For example, how many times have
| we've seen a click-bait-y title followed by content or
| narrative reflective of that mindset?
| Tagbert wrote:
| The actual articles are often not as clickbaity as the
| titles. Also, sometimes there is no alternate source.
| deprecative wrote:
| Click bait makes money. Unless some special magic is
| going on with a publication they'll all use click bait
| titles.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Well, it's a balancing act. The original title may represent
| the article more accurately than the submitter's title, or it
| may be misleading clickbait and the submitter is trying to
| improve that. The policy here seems to be the best middle
| ground we can do, mostly go by the original title but also be
| ready to edit away from clickbait (which of course is
| subjective.)
| Sujeto wrote:
| I think I just know what the thing is going to be about. I just
| need to read a headline. If I think there's more to it I force
| myself to read a bit. Something that comes with repeating
| patterns over and over again for decades.
| skilled wrote:
| People hack themselves to find the quickest release of feel-good
| chemicals in their brain but most do it at the expense of not
| realizing that it numbs their entire existence.
|
| And now it's more prevalent than it ever has been. Grabbing a
| phone is a nice way to stay in the shell that you have built
| around yourself and pretend like you have control over your life,
| but no one has control over their lives.
|
| The more you build walls of ideas around yourself the easier it
| becomes to make you discombobulated with the slightest gust of
| wind.
|
| It's honestly pathetic we live this way and continue pretending
| it's normal and that's how it should be.
| basisword wrote:
| >> Grabbing a phone is a nice way to stay in the shell that you
| have built around yourself and pretend like you have control
| over your life, but no one has control over their lives.
|
| Probably a major cause of the increased levels of anxiety
| younger generations have. Simple things like blocking out the
| world with headphones, or standing in line engrossed in your
| phone reduce the likelihood of somebody interacting with you in
| a way you don't control. Avoidance breeds anxiety.
| skilled wrote:
| And the problem is that the more closed you become, the more
| amplified are your experiences which you deem hostile.
|
| A member in my family is like this and I try to leave her
| alone for the most part, but there are opportunities where I
| try to remind her that no one is out there to get you.
|
| Just do nice/good things for yourself and the rest will
| present itself.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Many people's lives are not that good, there are many people
| with bad jobs they hate, or partners they can't stand. It's
| easy to imagine why humans act this way.
|
| What makes you think your life is so much better?
| skilled wrote:
| Because I happen to come from the gutter like most people. I
| was manipulated, bullied, I was a drug addict and I did a lot
| of other dumb shit. I am so extremely experienced in how
| gullible humans beings are it's honestly sometimes hard to
| live in this world.
|
| And if you're wondering why it's hard, it's because those
| experiences define who you are. Do you think I chose them
| because I thought it would be fun? Nah, those are the things
| I had to experience and learn from.
|
| Most people don't want to learn from their mistakes because
| it means you have to give up a lot all at once. How are you
| going to be a decent human being if you can't give up the old
| to let it the new? Your plan is to spend the rest of your
| life feeling sorry for yourself?
|
| That is quite pathetic.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| >Your plan is to spend the rest of your life feeling sorry
| for yourself?
|
| You are the only one feeling sorry for other people in this
| conversation.
|
| Even people with what would be generally considered great
| lives chase dopamine. Believe whatever narrative you need
| to, but in general this behavior is not that deep or
| problematic vs an actual drug addiction or real problems.
| It seems you have an axe to grind with anything "self-
| control" related.
| skilled wrote:
| [flagged]
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| You are implying that my argument isn't from experience
| when it is. My argument is that you are biased and
| projecting your own self-control problems on others and
| treating your solution as a universal truth to be
| learned. You are also conflating people looking at their
| phones to your previous drug addiction.
|
| >And please don't use what a person has said
|
| Ok, I'll remember to not include any topics or details
| anyone ever brings up in conversation. I don't think any
| more or less of you based on your past you mentioned. I'm
| just attributing it to your bias.
|
| Criticism is not disrespectful. I should probably stop
| replying to your messages however, this is going
| somewhere unhelpful so I apologize for that.
|
| All this being said, if your disdain for that behavior
| keeps you personally away from bad behavior, I could see
| how promoting that strategy internally and externally is
| important to you. Disdain can be a useful tool.
| ThrowAway1922A wrote:
| Your comment resonates a lot, at least with me. I don't enjoy
| my life, any distraction I can get and any negative
| interaction I can block is a positive for me.
|
| I don't care if someone finds it problematic or pathetic, at
| the end of the day I just need to get through the day,
| something that sometimes is really, really difficult.
|
| I really don't care for extremely judgmental people like the
| one you replied to, they either don't get it, or somehow
| figured our different ways to cope and consider themselves
| far superior to the rest of us.
| disadvantage wrote:
| > The more you build walls of ideas around yourself the easier
| it becomes to make you discombobulated with the slightest gust
| of wind.
|
| Resilience can be cultivated with practice. The more you enter
| caves you don't want to enter, the more treasure you find.
| skilled wrote:
| Exactly. And sometimes you will enter a cave that is so full
| of terror it might knock you out for a while, but there are
| two things to this:
|
| 1) you actually made it that far. Life doesn't treat you like
| shit when you are trying, it simply ups the ante and then you
| see how far you can go.
|
| 2) you now have an opportunity to learn from yourself. How
| did you end up in this place and how bad was it really? How
| would you feel about going back and how would you approach
| the situation this time?
|
| And the treasure you find is wisdom that you can then pass
| onto other people, particularly those close to you.
|
| I have been fortunate to meet people who have had a lot of
| experience with this but I consider myself an absolute
| apprentice even if I have dared to take a few big leaps.
| devmor wrote:
| This is entirely anecdotal, and as I have ADHD this may not be
| the norm; but I have noticed throughout my life so far that my
| attention span is a product of what I pay attention to.
|
| If I am primarily consuming content to enrich myself or
| critically analyze something, my attention span tends to be
| longer for a period of time. Conversely, if I am consuming
| content to socialize or out of boredom, my attention span
| shortens significantly.
|
| In both cases, there seems to be a "cooldown period" of at least
| several days before my attention span reverts to somewhere in the
| middle. I wonder if others share in this phenomenon and how
| common it is.
| ImaCake wrote:
| Yeah I, subjectively, have experienced the same. But with the
| same caveat about having ADHD. What I find more substantial is
| my stress level correlates with what media I consume. Books,
| long form writing, or even just any text medium (as opposed to
| video) tend to be more relaxing and allow me to focus better.
|
| I wonder if stress is the causal mechanism for focus here?
| Maybe not entirely but a proportion of it.
|
| I think speculation is allowed here since the author was unable
| to draw substantial conclusions either. But did distill a lot
| of useful information together.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I also highly recommend at least the first few of the Chemical
| Hunger series as well:
| https://slimemoldtimemold.com/tag/a-chemical-hunger/
|
| While not without it's problems (which is to be expected
| considering the impossibly complex subject matter), It does a
| fantastic job detailing how the obesity epidemic is not some kind
| of oversimplified moral sin issue where we all suddenly became
| gluttonous ("just eat less!") and slothful ("just do more").
|
| The major thing I find lacking is the omission of just how much
| the many different types of fatty and amino acids also act as
| major chemical signals that ultimately[0] affect whether your
| body tries to burn energy "wastefully" for heat, or tries to
| store it. The articles leans toward environmental chemicals as
| being the primary effectors subtly acting on our metabolism, but
| the very food we eat is itself a massive load of chemicals with
| complex effects that we can't ignore.
|
| [0] The next time someone wanting to feel clever and smug about
| it says "calories in, calories out" or "muh thermodynamics", send
| them this: http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1
| transcoderx wrote:
| [dead]
| mehlmao wrote:
| Love people implying their beliefs are empirical by arbitrarily
| assigning percentage values.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| I think this is just an unusual attempt to formulate their
| guesses more precisely without relying on linguistics. You
| could see it as somewhat earnest, as in they can be shown to
| wrong to a certain extent, and can't try to weasel out of their
| specific claims. In this kind of meta study without a
| quantitative result, I think it conveys the intention rather
| well.
| iharhajster wrote:
| Why is attention span even so important? At a survival mechanism
| level, shouldn't imediate threat priority assignment be more of
| value long term than attention span? Since we spend less time
| focusing on one thing now, maybe our survival performance as a
| species increased. What am I missing?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Soooo how to we get it back?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Recognize that your most focused mindstate is first thing in
| the morning. Do tasks that require the longest attention span
| right then. Don't turn your phone on until they're done.
|
| Generally don't keep your phone in your pocket, put it in
| another room on silent. Disable lockscreen notifications for
| all apps but the essentials. Do the same to your computer. No
| screen time 2 hours before bed.
|
| Do long cardio workouts outside.
|
| Recognize that it's OK to be bored, you don't need to fill
| every gap by looking at your phone. It's OK just to let your
| mind wander around.
| chasd00 wrote:
| You just pay attention longer. It takes effort but that's all
| you really need to do. For example, go observe and pay
| attention to a plant for 45min. Think of it like a workout,
| it's uncomfortable and a PITA but that's all there is to it.
| esafak wrote:
| Curb usage of attention-seeking technologies. Shift your
| habits. Start by acknowledging the problem and its sources.
| Distance yourself from them psychologically, then physically.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| You give up looking at screens in your free time, that's the
| only real answer. It's sucks, it's hard, and I've had no
| success at it, but that seems to be the key.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Permit me to tie a couple of personal observation on this topic.
|
| I do not think we "lost" our ability. I think we changed our
| thinking.
|
| I think the world has mostly accepted the "good enough" versus
| "perfect". As we all have heard, to become an expert, on average
| we need to pursue the subject for 10 thousand hours (? Malcolm
| Gladwell). But, we do not need to spend 20 years practicing. We
| can obtain "good enough" in a few weeks, or even few hours
| (obviously depending on the subject).
|
| For example, to win the _Grand Prix de la baguette de Tradition
| Francaise de la Ville de Paris_ (i.e., French Baguette
| Competition of Paris), many spend a lifetime perfecting their
| craft. I can teach you in a day how to make an edible baguette
| that the average consumer will enjoy.
|
| I think our "attention span" has shifted to "good enough" in many
| instances. I do not think this destroyed our attention span
| capability, it just made it slightly different.
|
| Final anecdote to "prove" my point we did not lose our attention.
| I have taken ADHD-diagnosed boys to camp and fish. Of the twelve
| (ages 12-16), only one could not sit patiently and watch the line
| and bobber for extended period. He became bored, and started
| whittling for the same amount of time. Once they returned to
| "civilization", they "became" ADHD again.
|
| As someone already noted, in my experience humans cannot
| multitask. We can context switch, some very slowly, and some very
| fast. But, we do not multitask.
| fleischhauf wrote:
| ADHD is a physical change in the brain tho, it goes so far that
| it alters the effects of drugs like cocaine
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I think we changed our thinking. I think the world has mostly
| accepted the "good enough" versus "perfect". [...] For example,
| to win [a famous baguette competition] many spend a lifetime
| perfecting their craft.
|
| Hasn't it always been that way, though?
|
| Decades or centuries ago we've been doing things (e.g.
| breadmaking) with fewer resources and worse tools and tighter
| margins, so "good enough" was probably even more important,
| rather than less. Great works were often made despite those
| limits, rather than in concert with them. Surely the techniques
| and investments used in competition are not the same ones that
| baker would use to feed a large hungry crowd.
|
| "Perfect" probably only showed up either (A) where that's just
| the next frontier for a successful professional to stay engaged
| in their craft or promote their brand and (B) products
| commissioned by figurative if not literal royalty.
| kshacker wrote:
| My attention span is making me re-read your comment to
| decipher whether I agree or disagree. Jury is still out on
| this one :)
|
| Anyways, over a decade back, I was watching a recording of a
| musical artist from either the 70s or 80s, and was surprised
| at the quality of the presentation (audio, music, harmony
| within the team) and was thinking on the same lines - good vs
| good enough, and how this team working in the 70s made
| musical magic.
|
| I think the constraints those days made the masters really
| practice practice practice so that they could be great at the
| spur of the moment. A lot of people today may be more expert
| in synthesizing music so they can take a second's worth of
| snippet here, 5 seconds of snippets there, and eventually
| make something good, but it is all editing and they may not
| be able to do that live, but the old timey greats had to
| perform live, and for that they had to be great.
|
| I am not saying no one does live music nowadays, quite the
| contrary, just saying that a lot of great music comes from
| people who never do live music, and that is because they can
| afford the luxury of 'editing' (which is kinda similar to
| divided attention span). Similarly, for the baker once the
| bread has gone bad there is nothing they can do but to start
| over, and that would be the incentive to get everything
| right.
| watwut wrote:
| The 10000 thing was always pseudoscience anyway.
|
| What happened in the past is that you obtained good enough with
| a lot more hours and effort then now. And perfection, however
| you define it, was even further out of reach.
| pwpw wrote:
| > Final anecdote to "prove" my point we did not lose our
| attention. I have taken ADHD-diagnosed boys to camp and fish.
| Of the twelve (ages 12-16), only one could not sit patiently
| and watch the line and bobber for extended period.
|
| You're completely misrepresenting ADHD, so I don't see how this
| anecdote proves your point.
|
| ADHD isn't the inability to focus. In fact, it often comes with
| the ability to hyperfocus better than neurotypical minds. ADHD
| is the inability to regulate focus on specific activities,
| particularly ones that are boring and not what the individual
| finds stimulating. Camping and fishing are not what I would
| typically consider a difficult task to focus on for someone
| with ADHD. Especially because it's a physical activity, which
| are often better suited for an ADHD mind rather than mental
| tasks that involve being sedentary.
|
| Perhaps what you're unintentionally getting at is people with
| ADHD are much better suited for specific tasks than
| neurotypicals, and society is largely set up to favor
| neurotypicals at the expense of those with ADHD.
| dubcanada wrote:
| I guess the question is not has attention spans declined, I think
| pretty much everyone can say yes.
|
| I suppose the question is, does it matter?
| niplav wrote:
| > I guess the question is not has attention spans declined, I
| think pretty much everyone can say yes.
|
| What evidence do you base that belief on?
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| That heavily depends on the context. Is your child having
| difficulty staying alert in the classroom? Then the answer is
| yes.
|
| Are you having difficulty understanding a bestseller book? No
| worries there, just watch a movie or something.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Do you think children should be in a classroom? I tend to
| believe that children should be outside personally, with very
| little indoor activity. Even if it's snowing. I learned way
| more by doing my own thing, what ever that is, then I ever
| did stuck inside of a class room having a teacher read word
| for word from a textbook.
|
| I think there are varieties in the aspect of learning to be
| considered, some don't learn the same way of others. And that
| should be considered as well.
|
| But generally I don't think attention spans have anything to
| do with classroom. People were not paying attention in
| classrooms WAY before cell phones were invented. The problem
| is the "room" part of a classroom in my opinion.
|
| Reading I do agree with though.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| "I learned way more by doing my own thing, what ever that
| is, then I ever did stuck inside of a class room having a
| teacher read word for word from a textbook."
|
| And I learned a lot more by reading stuff from Wikipedia on
| my own pace than I learned reading textbooks. So, good
| point.
| fredoliveira wrote:
| Most people require focus to come up with better ideas, so even
| in that narrow sense, I would argue that it matters _a whole
| lot_.
| qwertox wrote:
| My biggest problem with attention span is my eyesight. It has
| been deteriorating badly from myopia to having an added
| farsightedness, so that there is only a small range where I see
| clearly with or without my glasses.
|
| I can't motivate myself to get new glasses with progressive
| lenses because apparently they bring their own new problems.
| [deleted]
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Another commenter mentioned that modern humans are exposed to
| more content, and necessarily we must apply filters.
|
| I would go further to suggest that not only is there more
| content, but that content is expressed in a manner intended to
| only consume a brief amount of attention.
|
| Typically, such content is also presented in a way that
| encourages the user to continue providing their attention, except
| that their attention is directed to new content. And so while it
| may be argued that the person "is still paying attention", the
| rules of attention are simply different when engaging with such
| content.
|
| To be clear, I find such touch-and-go content to be generally
| reprehensible. It lacks nuance, and leaves little room for
| intelligent discourse. I am simply pointing out that it's very
| possible that humans are just as capable as they've always been,
| and it is simply the medium that has changed.
| anotherevan wrote:
| TL;DR?
| schumpeter wrote:
| [dead]
| donbatman wrote:
| Boring...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Does anyone have a tl;dr?
| dingusdew wrote:
| It's not enough to just base this on screens. It's also workplace
| environments.
|
| Even something as "simple" as working in a pizza place, say
| Domino's, is increasingly a frantic assembly line where orders
| can come at a breakneck pace through internet applications.
|
| You'll still be working somewhere perpetually understaffed and
| who give you basically no training, but expect you to pay
| attention to multiple threads at once, all day long. You're a
| delivery driver, but you're also expected to do kitchen prep,
| take phone orders, take in-person orders, do dishes, cut and box
| pizzas, help on the prep line and generally be on-call for
| anything else needed to be done in the store.
|
| When your workflow is literally _constantly_ being interrupted by
| other parts of the workflow, because you 're always expected to
| be paying attention to multiple parts of the workflow, you lose
| the ability to focus on just one thing for an extended period.
|
| Anyway, that's my two cents, it's not just social media, phones
| and screens. It's also a way of life in America, to be expected
| to manage numerous expectations all at once and always be on your
| feet moving. If you _can 't_ do it, you're likely to lose your
| (shitty) job, so forcing yourself to be able to focus on numerous
| things at once without giving your whole focus to one thing is
| literally pounded into your head in your workplace.
| asynchronous wrote:
| I'd somewhat agree that culturally we just don't value
| sustained single task work anymore. If you can't multitask 15
| things then you're useless.
| gochi wrote:
| Even financially we have decimated entire fields because they
| were single task.
| 31337Logic wrote:
| ... even though the myth of multitasking had already been
| debunked many times over. I agree with you; It's a sad state
| of affairs.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Most jobs don't allow for deep focus or long-term thinking. How
| do we expect people to be good at it without practice while we
| encourage the opposite behavior.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Yep. I worked at a software shop where they liked for
| developers to have roughly 6 projects simultaneous at any time.
| The constant context-switching drove me insane. By the I time I
| 'loaded into mental RAM' all the context for one project, it
| was time for a meeting about another project.
|
| For an attention deficit programmer maybe this is a bonus. Not
| for me. I like to focus in on the task, take notes, figure it
| out, and get it out the door and off my plate. I don't like to
| nibble on code.
| seee-I-Told-you wrote:
| [flagged]
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| my attention span is extremely short, can't even sit through a 5s
| short video, but I think it benefited my ability to improvise
| music (which is the only thing i care about now), it forces me to
| jump from ideas to ideas keys to keys quickly and kinda formed my
| style.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I'm sorry, what were you saying?
| noduerme wrote:
| I don't know if they have or not, but I just spent the last few
| minutes reading about the neologism ephebiphobia and feeling
| vaguely annoyed by the assumptions and general tone of the
| wikipedia article. Now I'm closing this tab and going to get a
| burrito.
| marban wrote:
| [flagged]
| chikitabanana wrote:
| I read the headline and opened the comments
| anjel wrote:
| Tl;Dr the internet is designed to interrupt your focus with ads
| and this rings your attention capacity in ways no one is
| ummmmmmm...
| kristjank wrote:
| I feel increasing frustration every time I see a graph with a
| clear upward trend being waved off as "probably just better
| awareness". I am even more frustrated when it's a graph tracking
| some mental health issue. If adult ADHD numbers have doubled,
| that _should_ mean _something_.
| ImaCake wrote:
| ADHD has only been a recognized disorder for ~40 years. Its
| only been accepted by the medical community for about 5 to 10
| years, depending on country. Its hardly surprising that
| diagnosis is increasing for something that has essentially been
| ignored by everyone until very recently.
|
| Keep in mind the first person diagnosed with autism died _last
| week_.
| User23 wrote:
| Cynically, I'd say it means that if you want to make staff
| Adderall is going to give you a considerable advantage over the
| next guy, all else being equal. Anyone smart enough to be in
| the running for staff or higher is smart enough to google ADHD
| symptoms and present with them at a psychiatrist.
| Eumenes wrote:
| ADHD numbers have doubled because people like drugs that make
| them productive, and the victimhood points you get for being
| "neurodivergent" ... aka, its all fake.
| ImaCake wrote:
| This is a fool's opinion. Spend some time reading what people
| diagnosed with ADHD say about their disorder. Medication
| merely makes them able to keep up some of the time.
| Eumenes wrote:
| I've heard and met many - its just hearsay to me. Fools
| believe hearsay. Until there's some advanced blood test or
| biological marker, the diagnosis is complex social
| engineering or at best, pseudoscience.
| Treblemaker wrote:
| The perception that ADHD is nothing more than the
| inability to "sit still and pay attention" is very wrong
| and very out of date. Before you comment further I would
| strongly recommend you watch a series presented by one of
| the leading researchers in neurological basis of ADHD,
| Dr. Russell Barkley, called "ADHD: "The 30 Essential
| Ideas Every Parent Needs to Know" [1].
|
| I struggled with many of these things -- primarily time
| blindness, executive function and impulsiveness -- for
| most of my almost six decade life, and finally
| understanding what was happening -- and getting help for
| it -- has been life-changing.
|
| As one friend put it, he would cut off his left testicle
| if it meant having working executive function. The idea
| that I -- and friends and acquaintances who share similar
| experiences -- are faking it is ignorant and insulting.
| That you do not suffer is a gift; be grateful. Maybe
| don't be so dismissive of the struggles and suffering of
| others.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4RKnr7ygXsO1
| ImoyB0K...
| gochi wrote:
| This idea that people are getting drugs to acquire victimhood
| points is so detached from reality, I am pleading with you,
| please spend less time on social media. It is not healthy and
| is changing your entire worldview.
|
| Your first swing at a reason doesn't make any sense either,
| as ADHD numbers have not solely affected adults. Even if you
| account for those "just wanting to be productive" by
| apparently ruining their entire ability to compensate
| dopamine naturally, the numbers are still increasing.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Collecting disorders and faking mental illness is a very
| hot at the moment, esp. among children (and troubled
| adults) -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/well/mind/tiktok-
| mental-i...
|
| The number of people in my life diagnosed with various
| disorders, with accompanying drugs, via short meetings with
| doctors they've met once is staggering.
|
| Re: children, do you know many parents? I know many and
| many of their children are medicated for ADHD. They are
| usually active and healthy boys who don't like sitting
| still in class or have grown accustom to video game and
| screen time, so when they don't have those things, flip
| out. On demand entertainment and smart phones have created
| a screwed up reward system for young children. ADHD
| medication is usually the prescribed solution to that
| problem. By the time they reach middle school, they have no
| chance. Its an uphill battle to stay ahead with school and
| maintain all the hobbies/extracurriculars. I blame the
| parents, and while they're responsible, the
| FDA/"doctors"/pharma companies facilitate it.
|
| I'm not saying people are faking things like schizophrenia
| or bipolar disorder. Mostly ADHD, anxiety, and depression
| disorders. Seems like 1/3rd of people I interact with have
| one of those, or all of them.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| That's all well and good, but it's a plain ol' fact that it
| could all be from increased awareness. If someone is saying
| "no, it's too significant a change to be just awareness," it's
| kind of a nothing statement.
|
| What's the point of bringing awareness to undiagnosed mental
| health issues if we brush off signs that it helps people get
| diagnosed as a WORSENING of mental health?
| cglong wrote:
| I went to a theater to watch _Mission: Impossible_ last night. It
| has a really long runtime (2h 48m) and, toward the end of the
| film, I started seeing multiple people pull out their phones for
| a time check; I had to stop myself from doing the same.
| trylfthsk wrote:
| I think part of it was the movie being mid
| chasing wrote:
| ~3hrs is a long-ass movie! I'm fine with epics, but, yeah, it
| most circumstances I'm looking for a ~2hr experience,
| especially if I'm having to sit in a theater. I don't think
| it's an attention thing, I just don't think most movies require
| that long to tell their story and/or show a few cool action set
| pieces.
| crooked-v wrote:
| M:I:DR has some very weird editing in the train sequence as a
| consequence of the production wildly over-scoping it
| originally, so I'm not surprised some people would end up with
| their sense of how much more movie is left totally thrown off.
| mikestew wrote:
| My regular reminder that _2001: A Space Odyssey_ was only 2h
| 23m, and _that_ movie had an intermission at the cinema. _Tess
| of the d 'Urbervilles_? 18 minutes longer than M:I, and that
| one had an intermission, too. _Ghandi_ had an intermission, but
| $DEITY, no human bladder can hold that much so it was kind of
| required.
|
| Your Marvel movie is approaching 3 hours, and no intermission?
| Fuck that, I'll watch it at home while your CEO whines that no
| one goes to the movies anymore.
|
| (Wait a minute, _Oppenheimer_ is three hours long? Sorry,
| ChrisN, but that 's one's getting streamed in my living room,
| too.)
| ravenstine wrote:
| > (Wait a minute, Oppenheimer is three hours long? Sorry,
| ChrisN, but that's one's getting streamed in my living room,
| too.)
|
| That's a smart decision. Oppenheimer was a good movie (I give
| it a B+), though very long, and the director (or editor?)
| gives the audience very few moments to take a breather. I'd
| have enjoyed it more if I knew I could pause to take a leak
| or fast forward through the boring part about the affair.
| xwdv wrote:
| In contrast, I watched Oppenheimer and it felt like the time
| just flew by.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I think that has to do with excessively long movies and nothing
| to do with reduced attention spans.
|
| Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min.
|
| I've read somewhere that blockbuster movies are trending
| longer at the moment, because people are ever less willing to
| pay the high prices for cinema tickets, drinks and snacks, so
| movie studios need to offer a really big experience to make
| it seem worthwhile.
| morkalork wrote:
| This is true but it's getting to be too much. I want to see
| Oppenheimer in theatres but 3 hours plus travel is just
| killing it for me.
| europeanNyan wrote:
| Don't forget the ads. They have gotten obnoxiously long.
| The last time I went, the ads for products and trailers
| went on for 45 minutes with an intermission so they can
| sell ice cream and snacks. I haven't been to the movies
| since.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Years ago I went with a friend to see Transformers. He is
| an absolute massive Transformers fan, so he insisted that
| we arrive no later than an hour before the movie would
| start. Me and my girlfriend meet up with him and a few
| other 90 minutes before, got our tickets, went for dinner
| and arrived about when the commercials ended and the
| trailers started. My friend was completely out of it, in
| his mind we missed part of the experience. I think he's
| the kind of customers the movies want.
|
| For me, I just get my ticket in advance and show up about
| 20 minutes late, seems to work out fine.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I bought a projector and a popcorn machine, haven't been to
| the movies since.
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| are you able to distinguish the quality from watching on
| a high quality TV?
| watwut wrote:
| I 100% can. I also do not care, cause ability to pause
| matters more.
| esafak wrote:
| I have those and it doesn't compete with IMAX and cinema
| sound, so I still go to the movies.
| ars wrote:
| You can't pause or rewind a movie. For that reason alone
| I would never go, and only watch at home.
| ghaff wrote:
| While I watched a lot of films on the big screen at school
| (I was involved in the film group), over the years I've
| watched fewer and fewer. These days my maybe once a year
| criterion is whether it's something I'd want to see in IMAX
| if I could. Though I'm not sure how much length has to do
| with it.
|
| I'm honestly surprised that movie theaters have come back
| to such a degree. I suppose the lesson is that the pandemic
| didn't really change things all that much--certainly not to
| the degree a lot of people expected. Even more flexible
| work arrangements, much less fully remote work, is mostly
| in some bubbles.
| redandblack wrote:
| take your time and watch das boot director cut
| Swizec wrote:
| > Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min.
|
| Not to mention an action scene gets really _really_ boring
| after about 2min. Just more and more of the same. Then add
| the usual hyperactive editing popular in modern blockbusters
| and it 's like _" Yo can you slow down a little? I'd like to
| actually see a punch happen sometimes"_
| tarboreus wrote:
| They're just bad now. You never get bored in Die Hard or a
| Jackie Chan flick.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Pretty sure most films made in 1988 were also bad.
| orphea wrote:
| > I think that has to do with excessively long movies
|
| Anecdotal experience but we (n=2) didn't have the urge to
| pull out our phones on Oppenheimer (180 minutes).
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I must admit that the fifth vibration finally got me to
| check my phone during Oppenheimer. Bio pics are generally
| accepted to have long run times compared to action flicks
| though.
| booboofixer wrote:
| Agreed. Went to watch Mission Impossible, i pulled out my
| phone once right at the beginning to put it on silent. My
| friend might have checked his phone three times for any
| texts/time maybe.
|
| All I'd like to add to this conversation is a request to
| not treat all humans as "the average human" as deduced by
| any scientific study.
| jedberg wrote:
| Oppenheimer is not an action flick. :)
|
| Movies with a compelling story keep your attention, but
| with action, your brain can only take so much stimulation.
| Unless it has a really compelling story, your mind will
| wander.
| queuebert wrote:
| Action movies try to keep your attention with ear-
| splitting volume levels instead.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| It's incredibly difficult to keep a viewers attention for
| 3 hours without them taking a single break, even if they
| are compelling. I was starting to get antsy in general
| around the 2h 30m mark.
| milesvp wrote:
| Oh man. I wish more directors knew this. I remember
| watching one of the fast and the furious movies. It had
| like a 30 minute long action sequence. That is long
| enough for the adrenaline to wear off and now it's all
| just tedious. I think i literally yawned during what
| should be edge of the seat action. I'm convinced what it
| needed was more breaks in the action, or at least more
| changes in tempo.
| javajosh wrote:
| Sounds like it would be a better movie split into 2 or 3
| sittings.
| ghaff wrote:
| 3 hours is probably getting towards the upper limit but
| it's hardly historically anomalous. Lawrence of Arabia
| was over 3 1/2 hours and other "epics" of that era were
| often in the 3+ hour range. (Though movie theaters often
| had intermissions which most would probably never do
| today.) Live theater (with an intermission) is often in
| that range as well although many newer plays seem to be
| more like straight through 90 minute length.
|
| ADDED: I originally read sittings as parts but if you
| mean intermissions, I agree. That's what long movies used
| to do and it's pretty standard for live plays much over
| two hours.
| javajosh wrote:
| Definitely with the intermissions. But I really mean that
| I often like to stop a long movie, think about it awhile,
| and then come back to it later. This is how short TV
| series work, for example. This is also how books work, by
| their nature. It's a kind of "intellectual digestion" -
| an intermission is good, but a night's sleep is even
| better.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, but no way really to do that for a theatrical
| release. You can have a Part 1 and a Part 2 spaced a
| year+ apart if the total length is 3 1/2 to 4 hours a la
| Dune. That's not what you're asking for though.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I think this says more about the quality of the movie than it
| does people's attention spans. A movie that doesn't keep you
| sucked in until the end is just a bad movie.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Look at Avatar (2009) vs the sequel. The original was ~3
| hours long, and a pretty ok movie. Kept the attention of
| everyone in my family from beginning to end. The sequel was
| 15 minutes longer, but we gave up before the end of the first
| hour because it was atrocious, particularly the paper-thin
| "dude, bro" writing.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Avatar 2009 had cutting-edge visuals, but by the 1.5hr mark
| I was bored. I don't remember the ending, might've walked
| out.
| ghaff wrote:
| The look of the original Avatar was something you had
| never seen before but the story was essentially a
| reworked version of the overrated Dances with Wolves. The
| latest Avatar is basically a remake in an aquatic setting
| and it has none of the visual freshness that the original
| had. I dutifully watched it when it hit whatever
| streaming service but it was sort of a waste of time.
| hot_gril wrote:
| New movies are just long for no reason. I feel like 1.5hr was
| typical before. Longer ones like Star Wars 5 and Lawrence of
| Arabia were worth, but now everything is 2h at least. Marvel
| movies are the worst offenders, often 3hr with maybe a decent
| plot the first hour followed by filler action.
|
| Also, somehow the art of making dialog audible was lost in the
| 2010s, to the point where everyone uses subtitles at home now.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Also, somehow the art of making dialog audible was lost in
| the 2010s, to the point where everyone uses subtitles at home
| now.
|
| Yeah, I don't have the world's greatest hearing but I
| basically always keep subtitles on. I forget what I was
| watching a few weeks back but I was basically continuous
| cranking the volume up so I had a chance of understanding the
| mumbled dialog and then down when some avalanche of sound
| threatened to destroy what was left of my hearing.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| My attention span is too low to read the article. Can someone
| summarize it?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I would, but laziness is on the increase and it's too much
| effort to type.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| The author tries to find specific evidence to answer whether
| individual people overall had their attention span reduced, in
| the time period where internet + social media became
| widespread. They go to some effort to define terms and review
| existing literature. They do not end up with a specific way to
| test for attention span, and they do not find definitive
| answers in existing literature. However, every thing, even if
| somewhat flawed, points to some forms of reduced attention
| spans. More interestingly, each element of the question is
| kinda questioned and widened during the article ("is there such
| a thing as attention span?", "is each measure of shorter time
| spent on an activity actually a measure of shorter attention
| span?")
|
| Imo what the intro touches on but fails to be explored in
| sufficient detail is what role gratification plays. I think so
| much time is spent on quantifying existing results, that when
| trying to design a good new test not enough time is spent
| applying game theory. I feel like there could be some good ways
| to properly quantify the link between gratification and
| attention, but I don't have the game theory / psychology bagage
| to go any further.
| EGreg wrote:
| In other news -- it appears that the attention spans of goldfish
| have been increasing!
|
| (Relative to humans that is :)
|
| https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/
|
| BUT:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/shanesnow/2023/01/16/science-sh...
| [deleted]
| reacharavindh wrote:
| I think it is related but not the same - instant gratification is
| what leads to our brains to shorten the attention span. I could
| see it happen to me in the last few years. I sort of stagnated in
| almost every endeavor because I was picking low hanging fruits if
| you will and did only the things that I could easily see the end
| result for...
|
| Until I started training for a half marathon. Not having run
| seriously in my life, I challenged myself to join my friends for
| a 10K last year. The training was an unexpected lesson in
| humility and thought - I could not go for the 10K regardless of
| how motivated or pumped up I was. I needed to train myself to get
| there properly... 2 KM on day 1, 5KM by day 15, and 10K by day 30
| or so. With enough rest in between. I could do the 10K last year
| happily.
|
| This year I am training for the 21K. I'm practicing for 3 months
| slowly improving my pace and endurance.
|
| I'm not what one would call athletic. I'm still doing it and it
| makes me incredibly happy.
|
| The analogy I went for is - the same applies to learning anything
| new, or mastering something- it takes time, and continuous
| effort. Not instant gratification. It sounds very logical and
| simple in hindsight, but I had to learn it as an adult now.
| adnmcq999 wrote:
| Someone get this author a grammarly subscription
| secondo wrote:
| I found it quite well-written. Why so?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours
| in the day. Our filters _must_ reject more.
|
| Yes, there are costs -- deep work & study both suffer -- but
| there are benefits too: informational content that can be
| compressed does get compressed. An introduction to a concrete
| skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an
| hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video
| and then a 30 second tiktok, by which point it has become a snap
| cut between the critical actions and finger-wag followed by
| pitfalls. You can look it up, watch it multiple times until it's
| committed to memory, and you don't have to spend hours torturing
| yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an
| astonishingly compact form of communication and it's beautiful to
| see.
| mlyle wrote:
| The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content
| in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain
| attention through a 10 second break in the action.
|
| I don't know for sure about causation, but the students that I
| see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and
| working context in a very short time. It's a very strong
| correlation.
|
| (And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us who
| have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second
| tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we're
| accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly
| presented snap-edited bullshit that we don't have time to
| adequately question is high).
|
| Developing some skills requires focus and careful study. We're
| robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| > An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time
| have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture
| might become a 30 minute youtube video and then a 30 second
| tiktok
|
| It's a thin illusion. Brain candy masquerading as real food.
| Those snap-cut tiktok cooking instructionals aren't teaching my
| girlfriend to cook the dishes any more than a snap-cut BJJ
| youtube short could teach me how to do a berimbolo. She's gonna
| have to read a recipe and spend hours in the kitchen, and I'm
| gonna have to spend hours on the mat with a training partner.
| colechristensen wrote:
| But also now I have a magical machine in my pocket where I can
| tap the screen a few times and get a book read to me sped up to
| my optimal input speed.
|
| Those two things (audiobooks on my phone, the default feature
| to enable play at 2x-3x speed) have vastly increased the
| information I absorb.
|
| Now if only someone could come up with a screen/document reader
| with a decent text-to-speech and decent content filtering, it
| would be truly magical (read just the bulk text not and don't
| vocalize every single piece of text, most of which are major
| distractions to flow and don't need to be read)
|
| Part of the reason I'm learning a bunch of ML things is so I
| can make this for myself.
|
| On that topic, does anyone know of a really good, open, text to
| speech model? All of the ones I have been able to find have
| ranged between garbage and mediocre, none near "good enough"
| for the thing to be useful to me.
| dv35z wrote:
| I used Amazon Polly (text to speech engine) on a project a
| few years ago - the "neural" voices were decent. I've since
| heard much better synthetic voice engines, but don't know
| names. What's the best quality one you have found recently?
| colechristensen wrote:
| My interests are in local inference, so a service like
| Amazon Polly doesn't fit my needs.
|
| I haven't tried anything so far that I actually liked so my
| answer to "what's the best quality I have found?" is none.
|
| The reverse though, OpenAI's Whisper for speech to text has
| been amazing, far exceeding my expectations.
|
| Having just looked again I found a list at huggingface that
| I will be poking through in my spare time soon.
|
| https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=text-to-
| speech&so...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You can listen and understand faster than you can read and
| understand?
|
| I am far quicker at reading than listening.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes, sort of.
|
| While I can utilize speed-reading techniques for some
| content somewhat faster than I can listen, it is an all-
| hands-on-deck situation attention wise and extremely
| sensitive to interruption.
|
| On the other hand I can push 3x or faster depending on the
| narrator for audio content in most situations and 2x while
| doing nearly anything (the only exceptions being literally
| trying to carry on a conversation with a person or driving
| fast on a mountain switchback road).
|
| I don't do "ordinary" reading particularly well due to my
| own brand of vision issues + ADHD/neurodivergence/whatever
| label is in vogue. This is a bit sad for me, but I've
| obviously got workarounds.
| trailingComma wrote:
| Some people are visual learners. Some people are auditory
| learners.
| [deleted]
| rustyminnow wrote:
| Though reading is more efficient, perhaps they just have
| more time to listen to audiobooks to the point it is more
| total information gathered. Multi-tasking for the win!
| wtetzner wrote:
| Depends on whether or not you have the time to read.
| Listening to audio books can be done while walking,
| vacuuming, etc. Also while commuting, where reading might
| cause motion sickness.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > There is far more content than there used to be but no more
| hours in the day. Our filters must reject more.
|
| Attention span cannot be measured by what we don't pay
| attention to. And there has always - always - been more
| information than anyone could process. I think it quite
| obviously is determined by how long we pay attention to things
| we chose to engage with. Clearly watching 15 second short clips
| instead of reading books has had a detrimental effect.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > reading books
|
| This rhetoric is partly why reading gets such a bad rap. So
| many people put "reading books" on a pedestal, and cite
| random educational studies on how the mere act of reading
| stimulates the brain and is beneficial in itself.
|
| But 90% of the books in this world are fucking boring to
| downright garbage and not worth reading for most people.
| Telling people to read "books" is as helpful as advising
| suburban kids to go "places" and see them stay home after the
| fifth trip to Wallmart.
|
| Would a random kid be better off reading "Rich dad Poor dad"
| than try to fix the brake cable of his bike ? Should they
| read "The Boys from Biloxi" or go to a theater with their
| friends and have an actual social exchange with a real human
| ? Are the dozens of self help books pusblished every week
| better than their Substack equivalent ?
| ethanbond wrote:
| They should definitely read whatever interests them so when
| they want to acquire useful knowledge (like what to do when
| the obvious brake cable fix doesn't work), they have access
| to tons and tons of written material on that topic.
|
| It's odd how you're acting like you're making an argument
| against the general imperative to read books, but your
| examples are people being requested to read _specific_
| books which may or may not be useful and /or interesting to
| the reader.
| djangelic wrote:
| I agree with what you are saying. Much like a muscle,
| when you work out, you're not lifting weights so you can
| lift more weights later.
|
| Your general strength is higher, so most physical tasks
| are easier. Same for reading, if you practice reading
| books and enjoy looking at the written word, then reading
| developer documentation doesn't seem as intimidating
| which opens more doors for you.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I appreciate your optimism. A lot of people point out that
| education hasn't changed meaningfully in hundreds of years.
| Professors, long lectures, textbook readings, homework and
| exams. I am curious if this trend will be the catalyst for a
| new education systems to topple current status quo.
|
| You're right: the sum total of human knowledge is larger than
| it has ever been so to reach the boundaries of our
| understanding requires more learning than ever. Compressing
| that learning process therefore seems necessary to continue our
| upward trajectory.
|
| I'm both excited and terrified to see what a "TikTok-ified"
| engineering curriculum would look like.
| abyssin wrote:
| Do you have an example of such a skill that has been
| compressed?
| cwkoss wrote:
| Recipe tiktoks are like 30 seconds long - faster to watch the
| whole thing than scrolling to find the recipe on a bloated
| blogspam recipe site.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I see recipes Tiktoks get readily debunked in longer-form
| content, such as by channels like "How To Cook That"1; the
| Tiktoks amount to little more than content farming. What
| real information might be present is drowned out by fakes
| and bad advice that exist for no other reason than to soak
| up eyeballs.
|
| I get far more out of longer-form videos, IMO.
|
| (And yes, the bloated recipe blogspam is _also_ a form that
| is rapidly approaching 0 bytes of information per byte
| transferred.)
|
| 1(even this is "cheap" content, IMO; debunking stuff leaves
| the viewer back where they started, although How To Cook
| That specifically will occasionally show the "no, here's
| how you actually do this, and it takes less time than the
| tiktok's "time saver"." There's an endless stream of junk
| to debunk, so you don't really have to worry about running
| out, per se.)
| gochi wrote:
| Most longer form videos about food are half filler,
| mostly to appease youtube ads.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Huh, the two recipes I tried came out great.
|
| Any examples of fake tiktok recipes? All the top "How To
| Cook That" debunking videos seem to be about other
| youtube videos or just weird food videos that aren't
| recipes.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I follow some YouTubers that try to recreate TikTok
| recipes and most of them come out just fine. If you're an
| experienced cook, it's really easy to judge whether a
| recipe is gonna be decent or not.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| there's no way anyone just watches a 30s recipe clip one
| time and then goes and replicates the dish.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I watch them once to decide if I want to make it.
|
| Once immediately before starting.
|
| Then once-or-twice with a lot of pausing and seeking
| while cooking.
| slily wrote:
| Doesn't sound very different from Grandma's recipe cards
| in terms of information density, potentially harder to
| follow if you have to deal with video playback. Recipe
| blogs also have compressed instructions, so it's not like
| you need to read all the fluff, but when first stumbling
| upon a recipe, a short video is definitely better at
| grabbing your attention and showing you the major points
| and the result, in a way that traditional blogs and
| cooking sites fail to replicate. Video is also better for
| conveying technique, but I prefer paper or cards while
| cooking something that's not completely new to me, for
| fewer handwashing interruptions.
| guerilla_prgrmr wrote:
| 2022: "Thanks viewing my part 1 of 9 introductory video on
| how to master regex...."
|
| 2023: "GPT make regex to remove white space"
| amoerie wrote:
| Ironically, your answer is very well compressed.
| hifromLA wrote:
| [flagged]
| asynchronous wrote:
| Was gonna ask for a TLDR
| kator wrote:
| just cut-paste in ChatGPT.. why bother reading it..
| cglong wrote:
| I just tried that; ChatGPT agrees with this thread :D
|
| > The message you submitted was too long, please reload the
| conversation and submit something shorter.
| coding123 wrote:
| can you provide a summa
| constantly wrote:
| Whew! I saw the original title about attention spans declining by
| 65% and was worried, but now I see the updated title and
| consistent with Betteridge's Rule can be confident they have not
| been actually declining. Thankfully I don't have to read the
| article as it seems long.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I know I really need books now so my brain can cut off and dive
| into a slower timespace.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| TLDR
| nologic01 wrote:
| We need to distinguish attention span as an inate ability from
| our time allocation patterns (where we exercise our agency).
|
| Did an elaborate psychological experiment recently (n=1) and was
| happily surprised that i am still able to read a book cover to
| cover, no problem :-)
|
| But "finding the time" to do so (i.e prioritising such an
| experience) is another matter altogether.
| neaumusic wrote:
| lmfao, writing 10+ pages about attention span seems ironic
| pier25 wrote:
| I've noticed that I rarely properly read anything online anymore.
| 90% of the time I'm just scanning or skimming.
|
| I do focus on stuff for extended periods of time like watching a
| movie, reading a book, working on something, etc.
| cubefox wrote:
| > I do focus on stuff for extended periods of time like
| watching a movie, reading a book, working on something, etc.
|
| Note that watching a movie requires far less attention than
| reading a book. Movies, first, are compressed stories (movie
| scripts are less than a hundred pages) where, second, nothing
| is left to the imagination. I'd bet that people read much fewer
| books today than before video streaming became popular, or
| before TV went mainstream. (I do rarely watch movies, but I
| mostly stopped reading books since I bought a smartphone.)
| f3d2023 wrote:
| [flagged]
| partiallypro wrote:
| I find it incredibly difficult to focus on movies while at home,
| I like being forced to not use my phone, etc by being in a
| theatre. I think this applies to most things; I don't know if
| attention has been declining so much as there are so many other
| things you can do at the same time which limits your attention.
| acqbu wrote:
| Definitely! Mine is so bad that I didn't even read the full
| article. After half a paragraph I went back scrolling through
| TikTok.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| tl;dr.
|
| Edit: Okay. That was a "low effort" response. So I'll expand.
| That we even have such an abbreviation makes me think that maybe
| (contrary to Betteridge's Law[0]) the author of TFA might be on
| to something.
|
| With so many different things fighting for your attention, it can
| be difficult to stay focused. It takes practice and discipline to
| shut out other things and maintain your focus on something. I
| don't claim to be expert in doing so, but I do try -- and fail
| some of the time.
|
| I believe that maintaining focus/attention is a _learned skill_.
| One that isn 't considered important to acquire/teach.
|
| Once upon a time, there were fewer immediate distractions which
| enabled (forced?) us to focus our attention for extended periods.
| Nowadays, there are so many things fighting for our attention
| that it's more difficult to learn that skill.
|
| Is that good or bad? I suppose that depends on your point of
| view.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
|
| Edit 2: Added the _missing link_.
| 10g1k wrote:
| I really don't... Hey, what's that...?
| gxqoz wrote:
| Maybe it's because, as a post next to this on HN tells me,
| attentions are off by one?
| dottjt wrote:
| I'm surprised no one here has mentioned mindfulness (is briefly
| mentioned in the article).
|
| It pretty much solves this problem.
|
| But I guess that's part of the issue, is that the problem
| directly obfuscates the solution, so the problem remains
| prevalent.
| cratermoon wrote:
| There's also the problem that "mindfulness" is itself
| obfuscated to mean something specific about autonomy,
| individual power, and personal freedom. This is a problem
| because it assumes attention occurs within a fixed cultural and
| economic framework as an individual commodity that can be
| traded. It's very transactional.
|
| The practice of attention beyond what the mindfulness movement
| has co-opted includes attention to the ethical and ontological
| structure underlying our experiences. It is subversive in the
| sense that deep attention requires questioning assumptions.
| That's something the purveyors of distractions would prefer to
| discourage.
| fuzztester wrote:
| I posted this after reading your comment:
|
| Ask HN: Do you meditate? How? Results?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854244
| disadvantage wrote:
| > In 2004, in our earliest study, we found that people averaged
| about one hundred fifty seconds (two and a half minutes) on a
| computer screen before switching their attention to another
| screen
|
| Maybe it's just me, but I look at several different screens each
| day (Phone, Workstation, Raspberry Pi for home network logging
| using Pi-Hole, and a tablet). Not to mention our main TV. This is
| all normal for people these days. One screen for everything
| doesn't cut it, unless you are very disciplined and force
| yourself to use one device for _everything_ , but I don't see the
| main purpose of that.
|
| Maybe if you're running a business with tricky logistics, you
| need to be pinned to a single device and need real-time
| interaction with your systems to get things done?
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I know my attention span has declined, whats difficult for me is
| I work in an IT role so its very interrupt driven, happens
| through tickets or direct messages. (Got a slack message while
| writing this message!)
|
| One of my favorite things about cycling is it forces me to stay
| focused while I'm on the bike, I can't look at my phone or do
| something else.
| bamfly wrote:
| My pet-hypothesis is that part of the problem isn't the tech
| _per se_ , but that office workers do parts of jobs that would
| have been the specialty of _several different people_ before,
| say, the 1980s. And not only that: they switch between those,
| and aspects of their own job, much faster than before.
|
| A person who had two kinds of tasks to worry about in a given
| day in 1975, might have twenty today--technology didn't so much
| eliminate work, as allow it to be more _concentrated_. Someone
| 's still doing the work, it's just five people instead of
| twenty-five, and none of them as is focused or specialized as
| before. _Everyone 's_ a secretary now, in other words--plus
| whatever else they do. _Everyone_ is the mail room. Little bits
| of jobs like project management or plain ol ' management get
| devolved down to ordinary workers. And so on.
| User23 wrote:
| Yes that's what "productivity gains" look like.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I feel like my own attention span has declined quite a bit, but I
| notice that younger people (including my kids) turn to Youtube
| for education - I've _never_ had an attention span that would
| allow me to sit through, say, a video programming tutorial (dear
| God, give me a book), but it seems to be the preferred approach
| for the next generation.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| I don't know that it's much of a positive tho, basically going
| from active to passive learning. Sitting through videos instead
| of reading books (much more efficient too IMO) seems like a
| prime example of attention span erosion to me.
| asdff wrote:
| And on top of that they aren't realizing any of the gain of
| the modern technology here. They buy a $1000 laptop, with
| $100 a month internet plan, to go watch a 15 minute youtube
| video with 4 minutes of discrete ads and 4 minutes of sponsor
| product mentions cut into the actual video, all to gleam a
| fraction of the understanding that a single page of whatever
| someone in their position a few decades ago would have
| checked out for free from the library. Whats all of this
| effort and technology even for then? The only people who eek
| out a gain here are the advertisers who now have put
| themselves front and center of what used to be an entirely
| unmonetized trip to the library, a known good source of
| truth.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > would have checked from the library
|
| Well, local libraries don't really have that much in the
| way of good academic texts - you have to have access to a
| university library, or be willing to fork over $60 of your
| own for a print copy, for that. But I get what you mean.
| blueblimp wrote:
| For those who aren't aware, this blog is infamous for sloppy
| work. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-
| proba...
| notJim wrote:
| I follow Natalia on twitter, and she's repeatedly tried to get
| them to address her criticisms, to no avail as far as I've
| seen. It's not a good look for a supposedly scientific blog,
| especially given that her criticisms are detailed and data-
| based.
|
| I don't think we should dismiss things based purely on the
| source, but caution seems warranted (as always, I suppose.)
| niplav wrote:
| This is a submission to a
| [contest](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/01/mysterious-
| mysterie...) SMTM are running, so the author is very likely not
| the normal authors of SMTM.
| axiomaticdoubts wrote:
| I still think it's important to note that the blog's work is
| shoddy. The fact that this blog post is #1 on HN means that
| multiple people will read SMTM's other blog posts, which
| contain several falsehoods that they've refused to fix.
|
| See, for example, this page
| https://manifold.markets/Natalia/how-many-of-these-
| falsemisl... for an incomplete list. I have been trying to
| get them to remove falsehoods from their blog for over one
| year, but it's impossible.
| Zetice wrote:
| And for those who aren't aware, lesswrong is a cult [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060440
| camel-cdr wrote:
| In the tread:
|
| > > Primarily he focuses not on developing a Strong AI (AGI),
| but rather focusing on safety issues that such a technology
| would pose.
|
| > That's absurd at worst, science fiction at best, akin to
| worrying about manned flight safety in the 1500's.
|
| It sure seems more warranted now.
| Zetice wrote:
| "Safety issues" are to him more like, "the AI will kill
| everyone to fill its objectives" and less like, "deepfakes
| are concerning."
|
| Though I'm sure he hopped on the "deepfakes are bad"
| bandwagon at some point to further his time in the
| spotlight.
| cubefox wrote:
| > "Safety issues" are to him more like, "the AI will kill
| everyone to fill its objectives"
|
| Yes, and he was way ahead of the curve here, since
| similar positions got a lot more mainstream in the past
| years and months. E.g. two of three AI Turing award
| winners (Hinton and Bengio) now say that superintelligent
| AI poses a serious extinction risk. OpenAI has also
| identified the alignment problem as a major issue. Even
| former AI skeptics like Douglas Hofstadter now broadly
| agree with this assessment. Yudkowsky's opinion was quite
| prescient.
| cubefox wrote:
| LessWrong is obviously not a cult, the allegations are
| nonsense. Well established researchers post there (e.g. Paul
| Christiano) and some even work or worked for OpenAI or
| DeepMind (e.g. Richard Ngo).
|
| It's rather that the cited source "RationalWiki" is a highly
| politically biased source which routinely attacks anything
| which is in any way associated with the rationalism
| community, or which engages with things that are deemed
| unacceptable by its far-left authors (such as intelligence
| research). They have in the past attacked highly respected
| bloggers such as Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander.
| qt31415926 wrote:
| Thanks, didn't know. This article seems to have been written by
| a reader though so not the same authors of the sketchy lithium
| work
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Lowered attention spans may be widely regarded as a net negative,
| yet I propose to reframe the conversation:
|
| * Call it "whiffreading" after the term in the Book of the
| Subgenius [1983]. A way to intuitively, instinctively and
| logically determine if you can get the sense of something
| quickly. If you sense it is worthy, you will invest the time in
| it. If not, and you feel you are wasting time, you skip it.
|
| Quicker abandonments, glossing, and skipping ahead are all
| natural human adaptions to the increasing and constant
| bombardment of data and stimuli we are presented with. This is
| why we want the "tl;dr." This is why you want a 1-minute
| explainer video instead of a 30-minute or 1-hour lecture.
|
| Now, _if_ you catch someone 's attention, they'll follow you down
| the rabbit hole and will keep reading or watching. Maybe for
| hours. Look at TikTok lives and Twitch streamers. People
| doomscroll, next, next, next... but as soon as they encounter the
| right content -- whabam! They will stick there until the
| livestream ends.
|
| Similarly, look at Hacker News itself. If a 1-sentence topic
| grabs your interest -- whabam! You'll read the article (which
| could be thousands of words long) and you may engage in the
| threads of conversations, which could eat up your day.
|
| Oppositely if a content creator bores people or if the audience
| start to sense what you are talking about is sus, or totally
| outside their interests, they'll just drop it. A post on Hacker
| News will sink like a rock in the middle of a very deep ocean.
|
| Again, I propose this is an _adaption_ to the environment. Time
| is speeding up. The onslaught of content trying to grab your
| attention is relentless. So this is the natural result.
| cloudripper wrote:
| I agree. I would also position that for some, it may be less a
| case of 'attention deficit' and more 'attention prudent'. There
| is way too much garbage content out there and information
| overload can easily lead to processing overload. Not speaking
| to the very real medical conditions out there but to societal
| generalizations - I place a very high personal value on my time
| and have little tolerance for wasting it on content I feel is
| uninspired and/or lacking depth or any sense of meaning to me.
|
| Then there is the issue of there being a high quantity of such
| damn good quality content out there (curses, HN). In that case,
| its just too much to ingest while working to maintain other
| forms of focus in life.
| ultrablack wrote:
| "So--why hasn't anyone investigated this question to satisfaction
| yet?"
|
| Would take too long.
| neilv wrote:
| I'd guess that the shocking "Yes, 65%" in the HN title is what
| catapulted it into the #1 front page spot -- but that bit _isn
| 't_ currently in the title on TFA (nor in the 2 archive.org
| captures).
| avodonosov wrote:
| Yes
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| wait, wut? wut was this about again? dude, like you just checked
| out, lol.
| theoperagoer wrote:
| ngl, I had to fight distraction to finish reading this article.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| I like the theory that the reason attention span has declined is
| because the demand for quality has hugely increased.
|
| Since there are so many blogs, films, books and videos out there,
| we no longer want to waste time on things that don't entertain or
| provide value to us.
|
| If in the past you might've given in and read or watched through
| boring parts because there was less options available, now people
| demand less B.S. and instant value. Because if you don't provide
| that, there's someone else a click away who will.
| fragmede wrote:
| Lord of the Rings. An absolutely genre-defining work, but if
| you read it, it's really friggin _slow_ and not at all
| compatible with today 's attention spans. It's not a demand for
| _quality_ , it's a demand to be endlessly entertained without
| having to invest the time or have the patience to wait for a
| backstory to unfold. Which is fine, I'm opening my phone to
| doom scroll for a second too, I just don't think it's quality
| that's being sought-after, but instant-gratification dopamine-
| inducting entertainment. It's _bad_. Until I took the time to
| retrain my. brain, I couldn 't read books because I didn't have
| the attention span for them.
| tayo42 wrote:
| It's like an 80 year old book written with an archaic style
| of English. It wasn't even popular when it came out.
|
| Most media from the 1930s to 50s isn't popular anymore. Taste
| move on. Idk if you can simplify this to attention spans.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| I think it's more a matter of investment vs. payoff. I read
| TLotR from beginning to end once and I liked it, but it's
| such a time sink for so little payoff that I wouldn't do it
| again. There's so much else I could do with that time
| instead. I'd rather put the movies in the background while I
| do something else over the course of nine hours, or maybe
| reread a specific bit I liked. It's not about instant
| gratification, it's that we're no longer constrained in our
| media selection. 70 years ago you might have reread the books
| right after finishing them because you had nothing else to
| do. That's not true today.
| ghaff wrote:
| The Return of the King is particular has a real structure
| problem. Multiple endings after the actual ending. And then
| really the final wrapup/epilogue is in the Appendix. The
| movie tried to clean a lot of this up--most controversially
| by axing the scouring of the shire--but still didn't wholly
| succeed.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| To be honest, the scouring is one of my favorite bits
| because it shows how much the main hobbits have grown
| over the course of their adventure. I think the multiple
| endings thing worked better in the book for multiple
| reasons. For one, you could tell at any time that there
| was still a considerable chunk left to go, so the
| narrative didn't create any false expectation that it was
| about to end. But also, unlike in the movie where it does
| the usual swelling soundtrack and post-climax wrap-up
| like it's about to finish but then just continues and
| does it again, I feel like the book doesn't do a literary
| equivalent of that at all. It doesn't feel like multiple
| endings, but rather multiple conclusions to separate
| story arcs, which is something the books do all
| throughout. The book is just forced to cram several right
| at the end, because it has to finish somehow. It's
| unfortunate that the structure didn't translate well to
| the big screen, at least not without cutting things out.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not totally convinced but it's been a long time since
| I've read the books and at least accept that a book is
| better able to weave together multiple threads and story
| arcs than a film easily can.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I never read lord of the rings. I read the hobbit though.
|
| The Tolkien work I struggled with was The Silmarillion. I
| understand it's not much like the others and was a posthumous
| publication, but middle school me struggled to stay
| interested enough with the way it was structured.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I believe the Silmarillion was really more of reference
| type book originally so yeah not particularly something you
| sit down and read all the way through.
| ghaff wrote:
| I went through a Tolkien phase but, yeah, the Silmarillion
| was a dutiful struggle.
| eastof wrote:
| Any tips for this retraining?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Don't rush to retrain yourself: consider whether things are
| enjoyable, or just engaging, and give it time.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| Not GP here, but I've gone through a similar brain reset
| exercise recently. There's no good way to do it, because
| it's essentially just dopamine deprivation. Caffeine
| withdrawal, internet withdrawal, gaming withdrawal -
| whatever stimulus you're using, you take it away and suffer
| for a while.
|
| Quitting my corporate gig has also been massively helpful -
| our big tech overlords were committing Guantanamo level
| atrocities on our minds via Slack overload, and I will
| never return to that kind of environment. I'm barely
| exaggerating.
|
| If you're a podcast kind of learner, Huberman has an
| episode on this "dopamine fasting" concept.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Read a bit in bed before sleeping, make this a daily habit;
| leave all electronic devices outside of your bedroom. No
| screens in bed; let your mind learn to accept that.
|
| Start with books you _can_ focus on now, gradually move on
| to more complex works. Don 't feel bad about picking a
| genre which really draws you in. You don't have to read
| Dickens on day one (although he is a great writer, older
| works ask a lot in terms of focus and frame of reference,
| including some understanding of society back then and
| there), and it's fine to indulge in Young Adult fiction if
| that works for you (Harry Potter not too demanding to read,
| and pretty good too).
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| I don't necessarily buy that. TikTok and a lot of content on
| Netflix, etc is cringe, or some kind of just "grub TV" or
| "trash TV" if you will. Doesn't stop humans from consuming
| anything to distract from what they need to be doing, maybe. Or
| what might be useful, more wholesome. To be sure, trash TV does
| have qualities, that make people watch them, not necessarily
| great ones though.
| hkon wrote:
| I think you are confusing quality with quantity.
|
| Quantity of dopamine bursts that is
| asdff wrote:
| It's not like people are reading high quality things though.
| They are watching tick tock. There is no demand for high
| quality work. People aren't reading gonzo journalism books,
| they are eating up soundbites and clickbait and very pleased
| about it.
| watwut wrote:
| I dunno. I think that quality in movies and tv went down to
| large extend. Average script is so bad, that basically mediocre
| dialog gets praise. Fights and tricks are better then before,
| but other then that, production last years is just meh
| sanity31415 wrote:
| tl;dr?
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| What? I was watching this squirrel outside.
| carabiner wrote:
| Trying to read classic literature really makes this apparent.
| Hemingway's Sun Also Rises must have been a riveting adventure
| story when it was published in 1926, but how can it compete with
| 10,000 hours of adventure travel on youtube, netflix etc.? Same
| with Moby Dick in 1850s... these were glimpses into exotic lives
| rarely heard of back then, but today you can find those stories
| or similar in vivid moving pictures and audio everywhere, in much
| more digestible forms.
|
| I really wish I could appreciate these great human achievements
| in the arts, but at least for books, I don't think my tech-
| atrophied brain has the ability.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I am listening to the unabridged audiobook for Les Miserables.
| Victor goes into tons of unnecessary detail about things - as
| an example they arrive at a monestary and he tells the entiry
| story of the place, including details and rules for who can
| wear what kind of color clothing.
|
| I recon that it is considered one of the great and famous
| books, but it could have drastically been improved if he had
| had an editor. A modern author would have had one and would
| have produced a better book.
|
| In fact, why shouldn't modern books be better? Nearly
| everything else is (compare central heating to a fireplace),
| and the rest disappear once you account for the price you pay
| for it.
| deadbeeves wrote:
| What you're mentioning has little to do with technology and
| nothing to do with attention span. Those books just don't give
| you anything you want. Well, why read them? I think
| microprocessors are great achievements, but I struggle to think
| how a work of fiction can be a great achievement. I don't think
| the world would be very different if neither of them had ever
| been written.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Books don't have to be experienced as vicarious adventures.
| That's what YA lit is, mostly, but we can read books for their
| insight rather than fantasizing about being participants in a
| series of events that they're narrating. There's no reason to
| transform their thoughtfulness into the sort of disjointed
| juvenile power fantasies that modern movies are attempting to
| appeal to.
|
| Also, you don't have to read literature or novels. Read the
| narratives and nonfiction around what people experienced in
| times and places that will never be experienced again, and that
| youtube and netflix don't care about. Read about thoughts and
| reasoning that exceptional and forgotten people had in the 19th
| century that are ripe for rediscovery.
|
| The death of attention span is real, but the idea that the
| substance of "content" now is of better quality than the
| writing in 1890 is a slander. It's just the difference between
| a quick, tasty, and a bit vulgar value meal at McDonald's vs.
| an actual high quality meal. The laziness gets addictive.
| bamfly wrote:
| Popular literature of years past looked more like those trashy-
| cover, cheaply-made, deteriorating, fits-in-a-suit-jacket-
| outer-pocket-without-wrecking-the-drape, thin genre novels you
| sometimes see carefully preserved in bookstores today, that
| never saw a hardcover printing (LOL, why? Pick one up, and 99%
| of the time they're clearly hastily-written formulaic crap),
| than Hemingway or Melville (the latter of whom, famously, had
| to be "re-discovered" in order for us to recognize his name
| today--he'd vanished from pop-consiousness _very_ fast). Or
| "penny dreadfuls" (similar deal) before that.
| allturtles wrote:
| I don't think you read Hemingway or Melville for riveting
| stories per se, but for their prose. The way they convey their
| stories in words that pique your curiosity or tickle your
| aesthetic sense. Words that express an idea or feeling you'd
| not encountered before, or express an idea or feeling you are
| familiar with in a totally fresh and unfamiliar way (btw their
| styles are very different, so you may very well find one
| engaging while the other leaves you flat, and of course some
| people will enjoy both or neither).
|
| For example, I have never read "The Sun Also Rises," but I
| looked at the sample on Amazon and came across this on the
| second page: "I mistrust all frank and simple people,
| especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a
| suspicion that Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing
| champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face..."
| After a few matter-of-fact paragraphs, the narrator suddenly
| slaps the reader with this frank and funny statement of his
| utter cynicism. That kind of thing pulls me in. I want to know
| more about this narrator and see what other shocking things he
| may have to say.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| Pick up some Dostoyevsky, it's still some of the greatest prose
| ever written and still feels very fresh.
| carabiner wrote:
| I struggled with C&P and Brothers Karamazov. On a 9 hour
| flight without wifi, I only got 100 pages in to the latter.
| esafak wrote:
| So don't read those ones. Read books about things that can't be
| replicated by video, like Joyce's wordplay. It's like how
| photography liberates painting from realism.
|
| And I fully empathize with your difficulty in appreciating such
| works of fiction. Maybe I ought to try reading one this summer
| myself...
| izzydata wrote:
| I'd like to believe it is reversible. It's not a genetic
| problem so it is a problem of environment. If you tech detoxed
| for a whole year living in the woods or something then tried to
| read Moby Dick it would likely be very tolerable again.
|
| You could study some people who have gone to prison and have
| little opportunity for endless media consumption.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Moby Dick was never meant to be read how it is read now. It
| was originally a serial, so like a webcomic or a fanfic
| that's actively being worked on. Those are still very popular
| mediums of media.
| [deleted]
| Fricken wrote:
| I don't need to spend a year in the woods for my attention
| span to come back. A day or so is enough for me to get in the
| place where I'm able to get lost in a good book. A soon as
| I'm back within short reach of the internet my attention span
| goes to hell again.
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I think the spirit of the above comment questions whether
| it's even worth reversing
| bamfly wrote:
| Relatedly, I've found my life-long "sleep problems" go away
| _very fast_ if I stop using electronics _or electric lights_
| after sundown.
|
| Go figure, you light up rooms with hundreds of candle-power
| like it's friggin' daytime, and have world-class
| entertainment of most any kind available at the press of a
| button like you're _living in_ a World 's Fair crossed with
| Vegas crossed with a Red Light district crossed with a video
| game arcade, and it's hard to sleep and you don't feel tired
| as early as you do if you _don 't_ do those things. Live like
| it's pre-war (more or less) and the problems vanish. Who'd
| have guessed?
|
| Hard to keep that up in a modern world with two working
| adults who _need_ to Get Shit Done at night and zero other
| people you know are living on that kind of schedule--plus,
| Winter nights are _way_ too long--but _it worked_. Sun goes
| down, read or play cards or whatever by candle light (I found
| two beeswax candles next to each other were enough to read by
| --and you 'll quickly figure out why really-old fireplace
| mantles often had mirrors behind them, if you didn't already
| know!) for an hour or so, and the yawns are coming hard and
| fast, time to go to bed.
|
| Shit for air quality, so, that's a problem. Never did find a
| cheap battery-powered warm-light not-brighter-than-three-or-
| four-actual-candles lantern to replace the candles with,
| while I was trying it.
|
| Once you're used to it, whole-room lighting seems blindingly
| bright and totally insane. Interesting for getting another
| perspective on ordinary modern life.
| skydhash wrote:
| Same! I can't stand bright light at night unless I'm doing
| something that warrant that (cleaning dishes, searching for
| something,...). I have a single desk lamp in my living room
| and just enough light to not bump to things in my bedroom.
| And my TV is not that bright (no HDR). I match the
| brightness of my devices to this amount of light, and sleep
| comes easily. Another thing I swear by is blackout
| curtains. When I turn off the lights to sleep, it should be
| dark.
|
| Anytime I turn on the main lights, it's like a shot of
| adrenaline as everything is just so bright.
| notahacker wrote:
| The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway
| either. The first print run of _Sun Also Rises_ was 5000
| copies. Most people didn 't read much and a significant
| proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the
| silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared
| with much amateur YouTube content today
|
| I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books
| particularly popular with today's tech addled brains will also
| be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average
| reader.
| allturtles wrote:
| Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure
| writer known only to academics and literature aficionados
| either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite
| a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was
| an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th
| printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it
| had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of
| "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was 75,000. [2]. "The Old Man and
| the Sea" was published in Life magazine, with a circulation
| of millions.[3]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Publica
| tion...
|
| [1]: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/hemingway-
| ernest/....
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls#Ba
| ckgr...
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea#Ba
| ckgr...
| ghaff wrote:
| Hemingway was probably the best-known of the ex-pat Paris
| crowd during his lifetime. I expect some the Algonquin
| Roundtable writers may have been at least as equally well-
| known though as many wrote for popular magazines. Dorothy
| Parker's first volume of poetry sold 47,000 copies. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Parker
| notahacker wrote:
| I certainly wouldn't claim Hemingway was obscure, but I
| don't see any of those figures undermining my point that
| the average person in 1926 wouldn't feel the inclination to
| read him over more digestible stuff (and the Bible) if they
| read at all.
|
| Sure, the first eight print runs of _The Sun Also Rises_
| probably had a total circulation equivalent to the
| playthrough of some tediously-narrated niche videos on
| YouTube, and by 1961 when Hemingway was firmly established
| as a Great American Novelist it had as many copies over
| more than quarter of a century as _Where the Crawdads Sing_
| sells in a quarter, but I don 't think you can infer
| anything much about attention spans from the appeal of
| literary fiction.
| carabiner wrote:
| 5,000 copies was a lot for the time. The book was culturally
| significant, and Hemingway became a celebrity for the time. I
| think this was as close to a minor "influencer" someone could
| be back then:
|
| > Still, the book sold well, and young women began to emulate
| Brett while male students at Ivy League universities wanted
| to become "Hemingway heroes." Scribner's encouraged the
| publicity and allowed Hemingway to "become a minor American
| phenomenon"--a celebrity to the point that his divorce from
| Richardson and marriage to Pfeiffer attracted media
| attention.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises#Reception
|
| There's just no way a similar book written today could have
| this impact.
| croes wrote:
| No TL;DR?
| waymon wrote:
| that was a long article
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