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Are attention spans actually shortening?
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Yes behaviourally, no empirically.
You get a positive dopamine reactive from viewing multiple short form content pieces in succession, you get an arguably more valuable serotonin reaction from viewing a more in depth piece and maybe feeling like you learned something.
How you’re affected by these feelings of satisfaction will influence your behaviour. I recently compared mine and my wife’s weekends, she’d watched a lot of short form content and couldn’t remember a thing, felt empty from it, I’d watched a series of a tv show and could talk about the story and concepts.
But that’s not all there is to it, Plato argued that the written world would dumb people down because they no longer had to remember things and pass them on vocally, maybe a decrease in the requirement for individual cognition, but obviously an overall good.
Edit: edit was messing with me so I couldn’t add this til now. I’m just a drunk guy enjoying dinner and browsing Lemmy, what you’re looking for is the simple answer, the dopamine hit, a minimal conversation. Put your attention span to the test and look into some open access research on the subject, it’ll be fun! And its all that seperate us from the YouTubers that we venerate so much
I do find it funny that people generally seem to be viewing shorter videos, whereas I often don't want to start a video shorter than 20 minutes. I've been watching a lot of Cathode Ray Dude and those videos have girth.
It's also funny that YouTube tried to kill off short videos a decade ago and are now desperately trying to roll that back.
Some great points! So you think that people's capacity for attention hasn't changed, but the types of media we're exposed nowadays to can encourage us to change our behaviour toward consuming short form content? But if that content wasn't available, they could happily move back toward longer form content?
I do agree that short dopamine hits do make me feel good in the moment, but hollow after the fact. Longer, informative content does lodge itself more into my brain and provide longer lasting feelings of reward.
Yeah I think that’s about right, our capacity hasn’t changed this quickly, just the menu has changed to suit a quick fix appetite.
People can and will still focus on longer form content, but maybe that’s their day job, so they want a bit of a release from in depth activity or ‘important’ information.
I think there is a real danger here in some form… think about how you’d answer the question ‘what did you do on the weekend?’ That could easily be nothing or it could be I watched a great series called severance that explored the concepts of labour and our work and home lives as human beings
It's pretty interesting how there really wasn't any written records for thousands of years. Entire religions and, as in Plato's time, whole schools of thought just weren't written down except for a few students notes.
Obviously time and decay factor into it, but there seems to be a culture shift at a certain point that more people decided to record things other than taxes and itemization.
I argue that the written word is our greatest invention. Without it we'd be back to square one every other generation.
Yep, that’s the root of the ‘how long do you spend thinking about the Roman Empire?’ Meme right?
It’s some of the earliest popular records of reflexive thought and philosophy, available to us because it was recorded, and still the same shit we’re struggling with right now