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How Tech Ate the Media and Our Minds (axios.com)
From a report: On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount. We spend around 6 hours per day consuming digital media. As a result, the human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds since 2000, while the goldfish attention span is nine seconds. And we just mindlessly pass along information without reading or checking it. Columbia University found that nearly 60 percent of all social media posts are shared without being clicked on.
tl;dr
hurry up
I was watching Neil Degrasse Tyson and I wondered if our society in its current state will be able to make new generations of quantum and other scientists.
I guess we'll just have to open the tap for more H-1B!
I was going to read the whole post this but thought I'd just share it instead :-)
Case in point, this article.
Apparently they started from a pre-conceived notion (tech is muy bad), pulled a few random sources to support their assertion (some of which, over 2 years old), slapped together a passable narrative and called it good.
And then Slashdot chewed it and regurgitated it on the front page.
Go ahead and try to find an authoritative source for that goldfish attention span thing on the article (or even on the linked articles).
Glad I'm over 50 and know what life was before interwebz. Still do. Its grand. Not being tethered to a communication device, coming and going wherever and whenever I want. You poor, POOR, self-imposed attention-deprived kids. Your life, your childrens, and theirs will never know the freedom mankind has enjoyed for the last 100,000+ years. I pity you. Truly.
The comedy here is that I clicked on the comments to check what people were saying about this, and it looks like everyone just read this headline and moved on.
I think I should comment on thi
I only got to "On average, we check our phones" cos of my 8 second atte
Such as this vaccuous story.
I'd be surprised if humans on average have a mobile phone.
Could this be more self-referential?
"As a result, the human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds since 2000, while the goldfish attention span is nine seconds."
I'll bet that the evidence for this is rock solid.
run around checking the validity of everything i hear or read but most of it doesnt matter much any way. i take a lot at face value but dont really think about it much i have better thing to worry about. i do try to use good sources though for hard news.
And in other news today, the proliferation of social media has led to the decline of proof reading your posts, leaving out silly, little, unimportant words:
On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount.
Perhaps this might read better if it had a simple, little word in there:
On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could BE three times that amount.
Yes, I did read the article. They left the word out there too. Oh, the irony of it all!
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Speak for yourself, Sparky. Not all of us are FB zombies. There are dozens of us. DOZENS!
Who the heck has time for wasting 6 hours per day on FB and friends?
Well, T.V. arguably ruined the mind of the older generation. The best people from that generation were the ones that self-limited their time in the common pursuits of the day. So, just don't do that and you'll be better than your peers.
And while it made some interesting pointsSQUIRREL
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"nearly 60 percent of all social media posts are shared without being clicked on"
Yeah, because it's now all about, "How does sharing this post make me look to my 'Friends'", Slacktivism, virtue-signalling and affirmation-seeking. Worldwide Digital Tribalism.
An article that uses the false fact that a goldfish has an attention-span/memory of nine seconds complains that it's harder than ever to know what articles can be trusted. It's not even good irony. It's just aggravating irony. The attention span statistic is cited to an article from Time, which cites it to a "study" by Microsoft, which cites it to some source called "Statistic Brain", which doesn't cite SHIT.
I asked a goldfish what he thought of the latest independent film I brought home, and he lost interest in nine seconds. Which is surprising because my friend, who by appearances I judge to be human, will discuss the film for hours. Obviously the fish is lacking in both an attention span and culture.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The real question here is *beep* hang on, email... ... What we must pay attention to is *beep* text message, ... hah (writes answer), errr right, as I was saying, *starts car*, err, *beep beep beep* (puts on seatbelt) It's a difficult world to *facebook notification* haha omg, Err... driving right now ... Send ... Semi truck horn ... 24 months later. I love apples!
Our attention span has not reduced to 8 seconds. Heavy consumers of media and tech do not pay attention to non-interactive content (TV, ads), but are better at paying attention to interactive content (games, software). This is a shift of attention from passive consumers to active participants. When presented with passive content, tech users tune out... no surprise. But that's not the same as a globally reduced attention span.
The full report is available.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I have a suspicion that anyone who has actually studied history will be well aware that life under most ancient governments was actually quite shitty. That is, unless you happened to be born into wealth/power. Life outside of "civilization" has always been largely at the mercy of nature. Please elaborate on this "freedom" you describe mankind as having enjoyed for the last 100,000+ years. I suppose people were content with less back then.
Won't someone children think of!
jeebus crisco, that's quite the run-on sentence... and it doesn't even end in a period...
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.
The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.
They're going for the ironic share without reading. It's a good thing too - the article is complete shit.
For most people on the planet, life is actually still quite shitty. In our modern world, somewhere around 20,000 children a day die of poverty.
Both now and in the past, the vast majority of people on the planet live/lived according belief systems that are/were inconsistent with factual observation and "logical" reasoning. Of course, even in the distant past, it's possible to find people like Epicurus that were more reasonable.
But two things are different now. First, we now have the technology to produce enough basic necessities for everyone on the planet to live simple comfortable lives - along with birth control technologies to allow us to prevent the population from growing out of control in the absence of starvation. Second, most people on the planet now have access to enough information that they could, in theory, each critically examine their own belief systems in the context of factual observation and logical reasoning. They can read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and think "Hitler, and Stalin, and Mao were people. So what does Lincoln mean by a government 'of, by and for the people'?"
There's that saying that was popularized in The Matrix, "I can show you the door but only you can walk through it." Now, for the first time in human history the door of knowledge is opening to most people on the planet. It's not perfect: someone in, say, China might have limited access to accurate information about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, for example. But people from all over the world can look at a country like Denmark and say, "Wow, that country has very few people that are trapped in desperate poverty. I wonder what it is they're doing right?"
On one hand, it's a firehose: a deluge of horrors and suffering from all over the planet both past and present that can be utterly overwhelming. On the other hand, maybe eventually people on the planet will eventually find their way through the door of knowledge to lives that aren't quite so shitty.
"On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount. We spend around 6 hours per day consuming digital media."
I would feel ashamed if I did either of those things at anywhere near that frequency.
I don't check my phone unless it rings.
I check my email maybe 5 or 6 times a day, sometimes more often if something is in process and needs attention.
I don't check social media because I don't have any.
And for the record, studies have shown that goldfish have memories well in excess of 9 seconds. Some of them can remember actions they've been trained to do for more than a year. That 9-second stuff is one of those things that sounded cool and so it got repeated endlessly until it became accepted as a "fact". (Similar to the "you only use 10% of your brain" and other nonsensical bullshit.)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
... they're saying it's time to bring back Short Attention Span Theater?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
So 12 seconds is good but 8 seconds bad? Seems like a shitload of assumptions being made with zero examination. Change is bad, bad, bad apparently even tho being able to switch your attention to other items in an information-rich environment seems Darwinian. For those who disagree, examine how eyesight works.
Did she go apeshit on him IRL, or just rant about him via her facebook page?
I genuinely am asking because I had an ex break up with me in-game while she was a wall over from me because I defriended her after the new char I had made when I came to visit her had less friendship rating than either our old characters, or her new in-game BFF (I had spent a not inconsiderable sum to come visit her after a year of online dating, only to have her shut me out face to face :/)
And as a result of this, we are maturing more late than our parents did it. I saw an research that said that before, without this all technological advances and these social tools, people become mature when they were like 17 or 18 and now the range is among 24-26. I am the a clear example of what this new is talking about. I spend most of my days in front of the computer, mostly in Facebook and in Youtube, seeing a constant bombing of news that capture me and make me forget the real and important things in life. Sadly, the trend it is going to getting worse... I just only expect that within a few years we aren't like the human beings in the movie "Wall-e".
Aggregators opened to common information supply to all forms of disinformation. Done in conjunction with social media manipulation resulted in the biggest intelligence coup in history.
Additional damage is occuring as unrecognized errors continue to accumulate is data across all platforms in all storage media; include biological as in the case of human memory.
As is know unrecognized error compound in magnitude over time and we become more confused, angry and less capable of appreciating our collective predicament.
Story at 11