Honestly, it's articles like this that lead me to be so stingy with my attention. I wanted to close the tab a third of the way into the article not because I'm incapable of paying attention, but because the article was wasting my time by shoving the same simple point into my face over and over again with no evidence or interesting implications. I will pay attention to articles with a reasonable density of information all the way through to the end. This was not one of those articles, but I read it through to the end just because of the meta-topic. After several paragraphs of restating the title in different words, peppered with pointless prose, the author assumes that you must agree with them about this problem by the last section. So what's the solution they give? "I have no idea."
And sure, you don't need to have a solution in mind in order to present a problem to someone, but you need some content to turn a problem into an article/blogpost that I'm willing to read. And this article has basically no content of substance.
I found this article to be sardonically meta and utterly ironic. Brilliant if intentional, hilarious if not.
The article leaks out in a rambling stream of consciousness to accuse social media of being exactly what social media professes to be: a (drum roll) stream of consciousness.
The article implicitly challenges us to stick with reading it, something it accuses social media of doing as well.
The icing on the cake is the end where our protagonist concludes “what can we do about social media robbing us of our time? Share this article!”
And here I am, my time utterly wasted, posting a comment about how fucking stupid it is.
Is this post-post modern art?
A feint within a feint within a feint withi…
“This should be put in a museum for crazy people.”
The irony of spending time on an article about attention that covers no new ground and is all noise, very little signal...
If you do want a take on attention that is pretty interesting I'd recommend Stolen Focus[1] by Johann Hari.
Hari suggests there are lots of factors at play - he claims some of them are in our control, but many aren't. He looks into tech dark patterns, context switching, ADHD, sleep and a whole bunch of other factors.
Recommend it, I found it fascinating and like his writing style too.
It's really not though. These apps are addictive! There's a real effort required to drop them and many(most?) people don't have what it takes to kick the habit.
I installed TikTok a few months ago to see what all the fuss was about. That shit is ADDICTIVE man. Even to me, a middle aged grump, who doesn't use any social media.
I had to uninstall the app a month later as I felt I was being dragged down into a endless scrolling coma.
I have had times where I have decided to close YouTube Shorts and been unsuccessful for an hour and a half after I made the decision. I have not had a problem to nearly this extent with other applications, and I'm not even enjoying myself while I do it (my YouTube Shorts recommendation stream gets worse and worse the longer I scroll, and seems to get sucked into a really disturbing attractor of the most vile forms of misogyny and straight up rape advocacy I've ever seen, no matter what I do - thumbing things down, reporting them, not interacting with them at all, nothing seems to make a difference. Creating a new account gives me a fresh start but it gets sucked right back to that attractor. Presumably because of my demographics.). It reminds me of something someone once told me, that the scariest thing about cocaine for them was that they didn't like the way it made them feel, but that they would do it anyway when given the opportunity. (I'm not trying to say these things are equivalent, of course they aren't.)
We are not perfect rational agents. Our attention span is hackable. If you find yourself largely immune to this, you have my congratulations, but your experience is not the only one.
"People should just take more personal responsibility when facing this societal problem" is itself a lazy response. We already know from smoking, car crashes, use of asbestos, etc, that chiding people to personally take action does very little to move the needle on anything compared to collectively-instituted safety measures.
(And, yes, I'd count this kind of stuff at least partly as a safety issue, given how endlessly training people to constantly look at their phones has affected the rate of vehicle collisions over the past decade.)
I think I intuitively agree with you, but I don't think it's as simple as "just do X and don't do Y".
It's akin to saying "Just choose to read a book. Drop heroin".
We'd like to think we have such control, but the fact is that these things are addictive and one can't simply "just stop" without a process and a culture that promotes these processes.
I dunno, what hope do I have of resisting however many millions of dollars goes into hiring the best and the brightest to hijack my brain into endless consumption on a systemic level: all media I consume, even to consume important events in my area, and every way I connect with people when I'm not physically close to them, the hijacking has a hand in.
Similar thinking to "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one." - Marcus Aurelius
For anyone that has beaten addiction, it is this kind of thinking one eventually takes on. For all the help that you can make to make the leap easier - eventually you have to take that mental leap for change. At no point is it easy, especially with chemical addiction, but it is the step than needs to happen.
On weekends I make a point not to open any social media and immediately go heads down into my project. I only look at fun web stuff after I'm mentally spent.
> Books are supposed to be source of INFORMATION. A source of WISDOM. They are LONG because they are supposed to express the author’s point if view.
Meh. How many nonfiction books have you read that had 15 pages' worth of valuable insight packed into 250? Often they're too long due to the economics of publishing. The truth is, the perceived value of a 15 page pamphlet isn't the same as a nicely bound book. No one's going to risk publishing just the valuable portion.
I think many people are now circulating those 15 pages as blog posts, TikTok videos, LinkedIn articles, etc. Few make money on books in the trad publishing scheme.
Conversely, I kind of don't mind the lack of attention span in others. In the cases where it's to your advantage to have the attention span to read a book, being able to do so is a powerful competitive advantage. And reading books is one of easiest things to do in this brutal world.
I find it amusing how the writing style even feels like it's made to be skimmed, the whole thing is broken into tweet-sized paragraphs and every third word is CAPITALIZED to draw your EYE to the EMPHASIS!!!!
Thinking about this a bit more, I realized that Duolingo, the language learning app, does exactly this.
It breaks up a large task, learning a language, into smaller bite-sized chunks. It rewards users with coins that can be used to do power-ups. It turns learning into a rewarding game.
Perhaps this principle can be applied to other domains as well.
Though there's the option of planting little long-focus concentration seeds by dropping references to both longer-form high-quality works and the mindset that it takes to absorb them within more accessible materials. Books have pretty much always had an accessibility problem --- they're hard to publicise and attract readers to, and there's a considerable infrastructure that's been set up in all manner of contexts to make this easier, including lectures (academic, public, business), interviews, serial and excerpt publications, etc. The fields of education and pedagogy (amongst others) are consumed with this challenge --- minds are not simply buckets into which torrents of content should be jetted.
It seems somewhat similar to me to autopsy and dissection --- the goal is to open up the body and reveal the interesting bits inside, ultimately with the hope that some might find a way to appreciate the integrated (and still functioning) whole. Books, unlike humans, typically survive such treatments.
I see the two approaches as bringing deep content to the distracted (what you're proposing) vs. calming the distracted and bringing them to deep content and teaching the process of attending. Ultimately I think we're going to need the latter. Though some morsal-isation may be of use. Keep in mind that there's been a long history of this throughout the history of media technologies (cuneiform, papayrus, codices, books, photography, phonography, video, computer games, ...), most of high excpectations and exceedingly limited success.
Ever heard of webtoons? Its that one Korean web comic format that is just infinite scrolling until a chapter ends. I HATE that UI design so much that I really think whoever actually came up with it knows nothing about UI or UX design to begin with.
Not from this blog article's premise. The whole argument that Postman has is that education should not be "edutainment". He's quite against Sesame Street for propagating the idea that everything we do has to be entertaining rather than taken seriously.
The other argument here is that there's a whole #LearnOnTikTok type hashtag and the question is, are you actually learning or are you just being entertained while you think you learn something?
Wouldn't that be contrary to the goal? If the goal is to facilitate deep thought, you cannot slice it up into little chunks. If you do, you still guide the mind instead of letting it find it's own path. The Aha! moments are the best way to remember things, for one. And slicing up a book would be an unduly burden to the writer.
It might be a good way to inform people about things they should know (worker rights, important financial decisions) without having them sit and read 10 pages about it. You could instead release the information in bite-sized chunks as a feed they can subscribe to.
For example, I wouldn't want to read a lot of the content I write, so I considered releasing the tl;dr as feed.
Anyone else feel pessimistic about the future of internet communities given the decline of places like IRC and bulletin boards where one could make real social connections with special interests compared to the rise of 'walled garden' social media with synthetic content to please some techbro algorithm and most users being passive observers?
Do not know the answer but I do not like where this bodes for the future of internet communities.
There’s always BEEN a lot of ANNOYING click-thirst content on the INTERNET but there’s something very META about so much clickbait “anti-scrollbait” winding up on the FRONT page of HN lately.
I think there may be typographic concerns to consider in some instances, like when reading articles on the web. I'm a novice in this area, but I feel like there are certain variations of line length + line height (measure/the space between paragraph lines) + font size + paragraph length that affect how willing I am to really read an article in depth vs. just skimming it.
Personally I find myself more likely to read articles with a tight measure, long paragraphs and an average font size (16-18px, even 14px on ScienceDaily works for me) than something with short paragraphs, a large font and lots of space in between paragraph lines. This is a recent realization.
For years I've taken to restyling websites, largely to make them easier to read and focus on. Starting with simply eliminating extraneous elements (social-media link-litter, registrations sign-ups, etc.), to re-specifying fonts, line-heights, and the like. What I notice is that even with only a few deletions or tweaks my mind starts settling far more at ease.
Using an e-ink tablet / book-reader for the past year and a half (see comments elsewhere in this thread), I've become highly attuned to how much typography matters both for the Web and in print. Whilst Web design is a dumpster fire, there are a tremendous number of poorly-typeset books as well (though as a ratio the latter seems a smaller set of the whole), some of which I simply cannot stand to read.
Web content generally reads better in monochrome (though some contextual details may be lost especially in graphics relying on colour). Animation is glaringly annoying, especially with high-quality display settings (more faithful text reproduction leads to slower refreshes and a flashing on animated elements). Poor text, typography, and colour schemes (anything reducing text/background contrast) are similarly highly evident, and kill readability.
Conventions of typography have evolved over centuries, largely based on the ergonomics of humans reading text. Violate them with extreme caution, you're all but certain to make things worse rather than better.
Yep. Good typography, straightforward writing, plain language and distraction-free designs are doing the reader a huge favor.
I spend an absurd amount of time editing my content for readability and easy parsing. The topic is tedious enough on its own so I don't want to add to it. People actually notice and bring it up.
> Maybe something that I’ve learned in therapy COULD be entertained as a possibility. It’s a technique that I don’t even know HOW it’s called but it boils down to dedicating 45mins to grievance. As in – you dedicate 45mins per day when you can focus on grieving (e.g. over a failed relationship) and at any other time of the day you have to delay doing it until your 45-mins-of-grief time comes.
45min-1hr of mindfulness training would be more effective, I would think
I think that sounds like a good idea, but I'd maybe divy time up differently. Maybe devote an hour on Sunday for grief, anger, letting out all the negativity, then on other days spend maybe 20 minutes a day thinking about the best things that happened to you that day, right those down, and perhaps when it gets to sunday you might find you don't have anything to grieve this week. An hour a day to negativity would ruin me, but I think maybe constructively using it to fuel up some addrenaline to attack the next week could be good.
Maybe a better practice though to print out some tokens that represent your anger, tape them to a punching bag and let out your steam that way, plus you get dopamine, etc from exercise.
People said the same thing about TV (and before that, newspapers/radio).
With any new technology, societies will overdo it when it's new and then eventually find some happy-medium. You're seeing this happen now with more awareness around social media overuse or digital detoxes being more in vogue. People are slowly finding their happy medium.
Fear not, it's all a part of the natural course of things.
We know this already, but I wonder what the remedies are.
My SO can barely watch a movie or tv show before she gets back to infinite scrolling socials, it's a disaster. 5 minutes is the most she can do. Going out with me or friends is the same, few minutes and she's back checking emails and socials.
I decided to lead by example and delete all socials, even reddit or linkedin, but it's impossible.
My family has taken inspiration from Orthodox Jews. At sunset we take all our devices and put them in a cabinet, turned off. Nobody can even call us on the phone. We have a big fancy dinner with fancy silverware and invite people over. Nobody is allowed to have their devices turned on. Until sunset on Sunday we just hang out or do whatever we wanted to do anyway, just with zero screens.
We end up reading books, playing board games, and having a lot more conversations. We're much more likely to go to the park. We often don't know what time it is which is a nice feeling. We also take a lot of naps because we're staying up too late most of the week on our screens.
I've also found I'm super productive on Monday after our screen free time. We've been doing it for a couple months now and I really like it.
I've tried to build my attention span back up. I measure this by how long I can read a book without the reflexive urge to look away or switch to something on my phone.
What I find helpful:
1. Try not to multitask. Do not look at your phone while watching a show. Do not listen to a podcast while working. I tend to use podcasts as a way to get myself to do something else I don't enjoy, but I'm either distracted from work or tuning the podcast out so I stopped.
2. Let your mind think thoughts on its own without input. Take breaks that don't involve any media at all.
3. Dedicate time to reading longer things. Set a timer and say "today I'm going to read this book for 15 minutes without a break". Or 20 minutes. Or an hour. If you're already at an hour you probably aren't in the audience for this article anyway.
4. Use the pomodoro method while working.
I'm sure some people will read this list with a sense of derision, but perhaps others will relate. Attention span is like a muscle that's been atrophied to a different extent in different people.
Being on Hacker News isn't any better than those platforms. Well, marginally better, but the overall effects are the same. Infinity pools of content, plus avenues for engagement in the comment threads.
The remedy is awareness and control over our info diets, just like our food diets.
Supersweet beverages are available at virtually every restaurant and grocery store in my area (and advertised incessantly), but that doesn't mean I have to drink em every day and get diabetes.
Plato said the same thing about writing/reading killing people's ability to remember/speak.
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
the same was said about books, novellas, tv, movies, audio books, etc etc.
I read the book mentioned in the article after a suggestion here, and Marshall McLuhan said it much better and without the boomer resentment. the author was a student of McLuhans but failed to say something unique.
You know what happens at the end of The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!"? There's actually a wolf.
It's fine to point out that just because some people say a thing doesn't mean it's happening, but you can't go all the way in the other direction and conclude that there are no wolves. You instead have to move towards a better way of measuring the problem.
Books, photos, silent videography and lo-fi audio never reached the point of being confused with reality. It was only with stereo and talking films that we started to see media start to threaten the reality–fantasy barrier theretofore robust in the mind. The fact that something like a jump scare works in movies but not in books shows a meaningful difference between kinds of media. Pornography overuse syndrome affects sexual function but I've never heard of a situation where this happened with mere erotica. Reality-mimicking media can produce immediate physiological responses where previous forms of entertainment required the active participation of the consumer.
Also, Plato quoted Socrates complaining about writing. I assume he didn't believe this himself (although he was known to sometimes put his beliefs in Socrates's mouth) or he probably wouldn't have written so many books.
Acute loneliness awaits you on both extremes of attention. That is where I believe the real problem lies, but it is one that I find is grossly exacerbated by these systems. It never seems entirely feasible to opt in or to opt out.
[+] [-] bhaney|3 years ago|reply
And sure, you don't need to have a solution in mind in order to present a problem to someone, but you need some content to turn a problem into an article/blogpost that I'm willing to read. And this article has basically no content of substance.
[+] [-] raydiatian|3 years ago|reply
The article leaks out in a rambling stream of consciousness to accuse social media of being exactly what social media professes to be: a (drum roll) stream of consciousness.
The article implicitly challenges us to stick with reading it, something it accuses social media of doing as well.
The icing on the cake is the end where our protagonist concludes “what can we do about social media robbing us of our time? Share this article!”
And here I am, my time utterly wasted, posting a comment about how fucking stupid it is.
Is this post-post modern art?
A feint within a feint within a feint withi…
“This should be put in a museum for crazy people.”
[+] [-] dmje|3 years ago|reply
If you do want a take on attention that is pretty interesting I'd recommend Stolen Focus[1] by Johann Hari.
Hari suggests there are lots of factors at play - he claims some of them are in our control, but many aren't. He looks into tech dark patterns, context switching, ADHD, sleep and a whole bunch of other factors.
Recommend it, I found it fascinating and like his writing style too.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57933306-stolen-focus
[+] [-] JackFr|3 years ago|reply
And yet…
Just choose to read a book. Drop Facebook. Stop reading Twitter and scrolling through TikTok. I’ve come to believe it’s really that simple.
Or don’t. Totally up to you.
But the idea that something is being done to you is both seductive and lazy. Take responsibility, act intentionally and don’t worry about it.
[+] [-] ux-app|3 years ago|reply
It's really not though. These apps are addictive! There's a real effort required to drop them and many(most?) people don't have what it takes to kick the habit.
I installed TikTok a few months ago to see what all the fuss was about. That shit is ADDICTIVE man. Even to me, a middle aged grump, who doesn't use any social media.
I had to uninstall the app a month later as I felt I was being dragged down into a endless scrolling coma.
[+] [-] maxbond|3 years ago|reply
We are not perfect rational agents. Our attention span is hackable. If you find yourself largely immune to this, you have my congratulations, but your experience is not the only one.
[+] [-] crooked-v|3 years ago|reply
(And, yes, I'd count this kind of stuff at least partly as a safety issue, given how endlessly training people to constantly look at their phones has affected the rate of vehicle collisions over the past decade.)
[+] [-] bszupnick|3 years ago|reply
It's akin to saying "Just choose to read a book. Drop heroin".
We'd like to think we have such control, but the fact is that these things are addictive and one can't simply "just stop" without a process and a culture that promotes these processes.
[+] [-] PuppyTailWags|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NovaVeles|3 years ago|reply
For anyone that has beaten addiction, it is this kind of thinking one eventually takes on. For all the help that you can make to make the leap easier - eventually you have to take that mental leap for change. At no point is it easy, especially with chemical addiction, but it is the step than needs to happen.
[+] [-] ge96|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcam|3 years ago|reply
Meh. How many nonfiction books have you read that had 15 pages' worth of valuable insight packed into 250? Often they're too long due to the economics of publishing. The truth is, the perceived value of a 15 page pamphlet isn't the same as a nicely bound book. No one's going to risk publishing just the valuable portion.
I think many people are now circulating those 15 pages as blog posts, TikTok videos, LinkedIn articles, etc. Few make money on books in the trad publishing scheme.
Conversely, I kind of don't mind the lack of attention span in others. In the cases where it's to your advantage to have the attention span to read a book, being able to do so is a powerful competitive advantage. And reading books is one of easiest things to do in this brutal world.
[+] [-] presentation|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccn0p|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judah|3 years ago|reply
Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?
[+] [-] judah|3 years ago|reply
It breaks up a large task, learning a language, into smaller bite-sized chunks. It rewards users with coins that can be used to do power-ups. It turns learning into a rewarding game.
Perhaps this principle can be applied to other domains as well.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
Though there's the option of planting little long-focus concentration seeds by dropping references to both longer-form high-quality works and the mindset that it takes to absorb them within more accessible materials. Books have pretty much always had an accessibility problem --- they're hard to publicise and attract readers to, and there's a considerable infrastructure that's been set up in all manner of contexts to make this easier, including lectures (academic, public, business), interviews, serial and excerpt publications, etc. The fields of education and pedagogy (amongst others) are consumed with this challenge --- minds are not simply buckets into which torrents of content should be jetted.
It seems somewhat similar to me to autopsy and dissection --- the goal is to open up the body and reveal the interesting bits inside, ultimately with the hope that some might find a way to appreciate the integrated (and still functioning) whole. Books, unlike humans, typically survive such treatments.
I see the two approaches as bringing deep content to the distracted (what you're proposing) vs. calming the distracted and bringing them to deep content and teaching the process of attending. Ultimately I think we're going to need the latter. Though some morsal-isation may be of use. Keep in mind that there's been a long history of this throughout the history of media technologies (cuneiform, papayrus, codices, books, photography, phonography, video, computer games, ...), most of high excpectations and exceedingly limited success.
[+] [-] cheunste|3 years ago|reply
So in my opinion, I really do not think so.
[+] [-] tomrod|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenerdhead|3 years ago|reply
The other argument here is that there's a whole #LearnOnTikTok type hashtag and the question is, are you actually learning or are you just being entertained while you think you learn something?
[+] [-] cxr|3 years ago|reply
<https://www.fastcompany.com/90392917/the-next-big-reading-pl...>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122075>
[+] [-] mordae|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
For example, I wouldn't want to read a lot of the content I write, so I considered releasing the tl;dr as feed.
[+] [-] omegacharlie|3 years ago|reply
Do not know the answer but I do not like where this bodes for the future of internet communities.
[+] [-] kingkongjaffa|3 years ago|reply
I use https://bulletjournal.com/ in a paper notebook.
I use https://orgmode.org/ on my personal and work computers.
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benreesman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ibn_khaldun|3 years ago|reply
Personally I find myself more likely to read articles with a tight measure, long paragraphs and an average font size (16-18px, even 14px on ScienceDaily works for me) than something with short paragraphs, a large font and lots of space in between paragraph lines. This is a recent realization.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
For years I've taken to restyling websites, largely to make them easier to read and focus on. Starting with simply eliminating extraneous elements (social-media link-litter, registrations sign-ups, etc.), to re-specifying fonts, line-heights, and the like. What I notice is that even with only a few deletions or tweaks my mind starts settling far more at ease.
Using an e-ink tablet / book-reader for the past year and a half (see comments elsewhere in this thread), I've become highly attuned to how much typography matters both for the Web and in print. Whilst Web design is a dumpster fire, there are a tremendous number of poorly-typeset books as well (though as a ratio the latter seems a smaller set of the whole), some of which I simply cannot stand to read.
Web content generally reads better in monochrome (though some contextual details may be lost especially in graphics relying on colour). Animation is glaringly annoying, especially with high-quality display settings (more faithful text reproduction leads to slower refreshes and a flashing on animated elements). Poor text, typography, and colour schemes (anything reducing text/background contrast) are similarly highly evident, and kill readability.
Conventions of typography have evolved over centuries, largely based on the ergonomics of humans reading text. Violate them with extreme caution, you're all but certain to make things worse rather than better.
Great handle, BTW.
[+] [-] nicbou|3 years ago|reply
I spend an absurd amount of time editing my content for readability and easy parsing. The topic is tedious enough on its own so I don't want to add to it. People actually notice and bring it up.
[+] [-] twstdzppr|3 years ago|reply
45min-1hr of mindfulness training would be more effective, I would think
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|3 years ago|reply
Maybe a better practice though to print out some tokens that represent your anger, tape them to a punching bag and let out your steam that way, plus you get dopamine, etc from exercise.
[+] [-] _mhr_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poniko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] askafriend|3 years ago|reply
With any new technology, societies will overdo it when it's new and then eventually find some happy-medium. You're seeing this happen now with more awareness around social media overuse or digital detoxes being more in vogue. People are slowly finding their happy medium.
Fear not, it's all a part of the natural course of things.
[+] [-] epolanski|3 years ago|reply
My SO can barely watch a movie or tv show before she gets back to infinite scrolling socials, it's a disaster. 5 minutes is the most she can do. Going out with me or friends is the same, few minutes and she's back checking emails and socials.
I decided to lead by example and delete all socials, even reddit or linkedin, but it's impossible.
[+] [-] wincy|3 years ago|reply
We end up reading books, playing board games, and having a lot more conversations. We're much more likely to go to the park. We often don't know what time it is which is a nice feeling. We also take a lot of naps because we're staying up too late most of the week on our screens.
I've also found I'm super productive on Monday after our screen free time. We've been doing it for a couple months now and I really like it.
[+] [-] tdeck|3 years ago|reply
What I find helpful:
1. Try not to multitask. Do not look at your phone while watching a show. Do not listen to a podcast while working. I tend to use podcasts as a way to get myself to do something else I don't enjoy, but I'm either distracted from work or tuning the podcast out so I stopped.
2. Let your mind think thoughts on its own without input. Take breaks that don't involve any media at all.
3. Dedicate time to reading longer things. Set a timer and say "today I'm going to read this book for 15 minutes without a break". Or 20 minutes. Or an hour. If you're already at an hour you probably aren't in the audience for this article anyway.
4. Use the pomodoro method while working.
I'm sure some people will read this list with a sense of derision, but perhaps others will relate. Attention span is like a muscle that's been atrophied to a different extent in different people.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pphysch|3 years ago|reply
Supersweet beverages are available at virtually every restaurant and grocery store in my area (and advertised incessantly), but that doesn't mean I have to drink em every day and get diabetes.
[+] [-] gitgud|3 years ago|reply
Or instead just put the phones on the other side of room when watching a movie...
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _oghd|3 years ago|reply
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
the same was said about books, novellas, tv, movies, audio books, etc etc.
I read the book mentioned in the article after a suggestion here, and Marshall McLuhan said it much better and without the boomer resentment. the author was a student of McLuhans but failed to say something unique.
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
It's fine to point out that just because some people say a thing doesn't mean it's happening, but you can't go all the way in the other direction and conclude that there are no wolves. You instead have to move towards a better way of measuring the problem.
Books, photos, silent videography and lo-fi audio never reached the point of being confused with reality. It was only with stereo and talking films that we started to see media start to threaten the reality–fantasy barrier theretofore robust in the mind. The fact that something like a jump scare works in movies but not in books shows a meaningful difference between kinds of media. Pornography overuse syndrome affects sexual function but I've never heard of a situation where this happened with mere erotica. Reality-mimicking media can produce immediate physiological responses where previous forms of entertainment required the active participation of the consumer.
Also, Plato quoted Socrates complaining about writing. I assume he didn't believe this himself (although he was known to sometimes put his beliefs in Socrates's mouth) or he probably wouldn't have written so many books.
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