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> social media brought down the attention span to zero > people just no longer critically process information, and move on to the next thing Sadly I don't eve

> social media brought down the attention span to zero > people just no longer critically process information, and move on to the next thing Sadly I don't even think this is true. I think "people" in general have always been like this, and social media hasn't really changed that. You mentioned the barrier to entry dropping to zero. I think most of these issues are almost solely a result of that. The intellectual bias that used to be present in "the discourse" has been erased. The politicians/CEOs no longer have doubts, there's no reason to hedge. They know exactly how easy it is to manipulate the populace.

papito 7y ago
While I see your point, I also believe the sheer shameless lies were not possible before 2007, pre-mobile and pre-twitter. People would consume the info, slowly, and have time to process it. Now, the you know who says something like, "you know, that seems shady, someone should look into it", and leave it there. And then just burry that under another never-ending stream of lies. I think both are really interlocked. Low barrier of entry = a flood of info = low attention spans as a defense mechanism to deal with it.
- smbowner 7y ago
  This is a really good point. The pace of shameless lying is so fast it's impossible to keep up. Even if you're paying attention you can't keep it all straight in your head. You have to be a real time BS processing machine these days. And that simply isn't possible.