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How Tech Ate the Media and Our Minds (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the story-of-our-lives dept.

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.

4 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. fucking kids and millenials by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:fucking kids and millenials by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I often think the same thing.

      When I graduated from highschool, cellphones didn't exist, neither did Microsoft or Apple and there was no publicly accessible internet.

      Spending time with my friends meant exactly that. Nobody was calling anyone else or checking messages 50 times a minute. Now I see groups of people who don't even look at or speak to each other. Sorry, I don't get it.

    2. Re:fucking kids and millenials by pr0fessor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      My son used to have a girlfriend that would facebook him while they were in the same room but rarely talked to him. It used to piss him off to no end she would come over and have her nose stuck in her cell phone the entire time then be mad that he didn't pay attention to her {aka he stopped checking her facebook posts because they were in the same room}

      One day I jokingly told him that if he was that unhappy he should just text her a break up while she was sitting next him with her nose stuck in her phone and that's eventually what happened.

  2. Ego Run Amok by pipingguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.