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Our attention span is being robbed
- blockwriter 4y agoAcute 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.
- jahsome 4y agoCapitalizing words for EMPHASIS and using exclamation points are not great indicators of a well reasoned argument. My attention span (patience?) is too short to figure out if this theory applies here.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- askafriend 4y agoPeople 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.
- fishcrackers 4y ago
- jjtheblunt 4y ago> Fear not, it's all a part of the natural course of things. i bet some said that too !
- askafriend 4y agoI think humans are far more adaptable than the doomers will have you believe. Even if that adaptation takes some time at a societal level. We've seen this with several technologies in the past, especially communication technologies. (Do you remember the doomer-ism around phone calls and telephones?)
- nso95 4y agoMaybe those with the more extreme views expressing their opinions is a necessary part of the process of society arriving at that balance.
- epolanski 4y agoWe 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.
- Apocryphon 4y agoBeing 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.
- epolanski 4y agoThere's a night and day difference between this platform and recommendation engines like IG, FB or TikTok. And there's even a larger difference in effects. The only reason I keep HN is because of the amount of quality-content related to my tech career.
- Apocryphon 4y agoThose platforms are worse but I don’t believe HN is any better in quality, just quantity. It’s a web forum linking to online content, it holds the same pitfalls for addictive behavior.
- epolanski 4y agoNo it doesn't, you're trying to stretch the notion that anything can be addictive with products designed to be addictive and distracting 24/7. Also, the amount of fresh content on HN is way too low. Can't be compared even to old reddit.
- NovaVeles 4y agoI usually check the front page, find 2-5 things I like and then move on for the day. Far different to all the others.
- Apocryphon 4y agoThis article makes a valid point and is worth discussing but damn if it isn't the epitome of a vacuous content writing blog, complete with a hypocritical coda of "if you like this, you might also like my other articles" and links to social media accounts to further the author's brand. Twenty years ago, it would've made for an anonymous, conclusion-less personal entry on a Xanga or a Blogspot somewhere. Now, it's another means for (eventual) monetization.
- wincy 4y agoIt wasn't even proofread. I feel like I only read the whole thing just because he said I don't have an attention span.
- trashburger 4y ago"You won't read this!" is the best way to make people read something.
- wawjgreen 4y agoahahaha. I think it was a case of reverse psychology and a pinch of culty mind control (you have a problem-- we have solution).
- vlod 4y agoI get a sense it was written on a phone and that each paragraph was written in 2 minutes before they had to doom-scroll for 1/2 hour becz they got bored. First thought was, give the person a break. It's probably some teenager, but it's NOT. TFA says he's read books "The Stand" and "Fahrenheit 451", but I question how long ago that was.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kingkongjaffa 4y agoI found https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ useful for thinking about this, and developing an awareness of where my attention goes. I use https://bulletjournal.com/ https://bulletjournal.com/ in a paper notebook. I use https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ on my personal and work computers.
- civilized 4y agoI just googled "bullet journal" and had to scroll through four screens of nonsense to get to a search result, the Wikipedia article on it.
- larve 4y agoTangentially related to the topic, but give the kagi search engine a try. It feels like regaining a focused internet back.
- dredmorbius 4y agoThe website linked above is actually a pretty good overview: <https://bulletjournal.com/ https://bulletjournal.com/> You'll find an immense array of exceptionally artsy websites, videos, image collections, etc. Much as Gil Scott-Heron said about the revolution, the bullet journal won't be televised. It's a process that is oriented around your needs and workflows. The key element to me is the index, and a set of notational conventions. Start with those and flavour to suit your needs. Spreads can be the next add. I'll also add my own set of reference sections (addresses, local hours of operation, informational, etc.) starting in reverse order from the back. I've discussed this previously: Main: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27200255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27200255> Additional: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20%22bullet%20journal%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
- teawrecks 4y agoIs this post intentionally formatted like an email from grandma? Or that time cube site?
- kleer001 4y agoThe bolds and caps makes my eyes bleed. Even if it was the cure for cancer I couldn't read it. /h (for hyperbole)
- jbverschoor 4y agoThe article also took a piece of it
- jbverschoor 4y agoAnd so did this comment
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- EGreg 4y agoTragedy of the unmanaged commons, in this case the commons is human attention. If Facebook doesnt grab it then Twitter will. The incentives of a for-profit capitalist society lead to this. Apple should simply charge for notifications, and share the revenue w the user!
- _oghd 4y agoPlato 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.
- l33tbro 4y agoDo you think our attention spans are not getting worse?
- scythe 4y agoYou 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.
- greenrock 4y agoI don't like this view that our attention is being "taken" from us, or that we're being "robbed" of our ability to focus and concentrate. Here are some other ways to think about attention: L.M. Sacasas: The language of attention seems particularly loaded with economic and value-oriented metaphors, such as when we speak of paying attention or imagine our attention as a scarce resource we must either waste or horde. However, to my ears, the related language of attending to the world does not carry these same connotations. Attention and attending are etymologically related to the Latin word attendere, which suggested among other things the idea of “stretching toward” something. I like this way of thinking about attention, not as a possession in limited supply, theoretically quantifiable, and ready to be exploited, but rather as a capacity to actively engage the world—to stretch ourselves toward it, to reach for it, to care for it, indeed, to tend it. https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/attending-to-the-world#details https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/attending-to-the-... Simone Weil: Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. [...] In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution or to the words of a Latin or Greek text without trying to arrive at the meaning, a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words. [...] So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. https://lithub.com/simone-weils-radical-conception-of-attention/ https://lithub.com/simone-weils-radical-conception-of-attent... David Foster Wallace: The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. David Whyte: The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoTLDR?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- judah 4y agoThinking out loud here...is it possible to use the same patterns for good? Like, infinite scroll, bite-sized chunk UI, etc. that trick our minds into reading a full book?
- tomrod 4y agoI've always been frustrated by the Kindle App for this very reason. It should be infinite scroll!
- ceejayoz 4y agoIt has that. Hit the "Aa" button in a book, go to "Layout", and select "Continuous Scrolling". https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-vertical-scrolling-window-splitting/ https://teleread.org/2018/03/21/kindle-ios-app-now-allow-ver...
- Kaibeezy 4y agoThe Kindle app’s infinite scroll is what finally made me let go of paper books. It’s that good. I get completely immersed. Can’t do it on an e-ink device, only on phone or tablet. Don’t forget to shut off the progress indicator or location or whatever they call it. Not knowing how far along you are is the other transformative feature of ebooks. In paper books, you always see the end coming.
- Aditya_Garg 4y agoOn the kindle oasis (highest end model) no matter how many times you turn off the progress indicator, it always pops back up the next time you read the same book. Completely kills the immersive experience you’re talking about
- ImPostingOnHN 4y agoI couldn't make it through the article because it seemed to be suffering from the same symptoms (so many 1 sentence paragraphs!) was that the point, and I cut out too early?
- civilized 4y agoSomewhere in the middle he mentions feeling like having ADHD and I'm like "yeah, getting that vibe too"
- poniko 4y agoI love the single comment on the article :) pure comedy.
- 0xACD4F66F 4y agoInteresting conclusion... or lack thereof?
- wawjgreen 4y ago
- twstdzppr 4y ago> 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
- _mhr_ 4y agoWhat's your favorite resource for learning mindfulness?
- Eleison23 4y agoMy favorite resources for "mindfulness": 1. Believe in Jesus 2. Explore contemplative traditions of Hesychasm, Centering Prayer, Hesychasm, Carmelite mystics, etc. If you attempt to divorce mindfulness meditation from spirituality or even from experience of a transcendent Divinity, you're asking for trouble.
- jackbravo 4y ago- The Mind Illuminated, by Culadasa - The beginners guide of r/streamentry: https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/wiki/beginners-guide https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/wiki/beginners-guide
- DannyPage 4y agoWere the random capitalized words an attempt to keep attention? It knocked me out of a reading frame of mind and I immediately closed the tab. Felt like I was reading a Made On Tv product pitch that always results in finding the mute button.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kurupt213 4y agoThe percentage of people with self discipline and focus has always been rather small.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ibn_khaldun 4y agoI 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.
- dredmorbius 4y agoI'd give a strong agree to this. 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 4y agoYep. 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.
- bhaney 4y agoHonestly, 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.
- dredmorbius 4y agoThere's a ton of just plain bad writing. The focus of the Web on the Now and Immediate tends to emphasize this. My own (somewhat aspirational) preferences / guidelines as to reading priorities: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669503>
- bloppe 4y agoThis really is the laziest take on attention erosion you could possibly make. Why even write it.
- mordae 4y agoMy favorite take from 2015: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/ http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-b... To the point and consistent.
- npteljes 4y agoThat is a very good take, wow. This piece emphasized what I've been missing from the usual discussion of advertisements: that it's ultimately unethical to influence people is such a way. Especially considering the techniques that marketing employs. "There is no paid version of Facebook." There's only paid versions of cable television, and yet it's jam-packed with advertisements, to the absolute detriment of the programming itself. There's never a guarantee to avoid advertisement, since it's working so well in influencing people, and influence is power and money. Advertising is also a race for attention - entities risk their status or even existence, if they are not advertising, because if they voluntarily don't advertise, their competition surely will. Regulation could help here, but I'm not holding my breath. So what remains is user side blocking, as much as we can.
- thenerdhead 4y ago> How to fight back? > Honestly? I have no idea. I went through this journey recently and wrote an entire book on it. I think it takes a hell of a lot of mindfulness practices after one becomes aware of the problem. Just 4 years ago I would read maybe 1-2 books a year as an educated person. Now fast forward to today and I read at least a book every week. I'm sure someone will say "how much do you actually remember", and that largely doesn't matter because one of the beautiful paradoxes is that you change through the books you read and hardly remember what you read in the first place. My attention span has been expanded by my mindfulness. You break away from a negative frame and create a new positive frame.
- vasco 4y agoI guess that's one way of convincing yourself that it's not your fault you don't read books.
- dec0dedab0de 4y agoI know mine is, and that I am extremely susceptible to all of these techniques. That said, this bit about books is a bit much "They are NOT made to be amusing, but to be EDUCATIONAL. INFORMATIONAL. Eye-opening" I don't know the stats, but a good chunk of books are meant to be amusing. If anything we've learned to communicate better through the written word than ever before in history. I am reminded of this xkcd from 2014 https://xkcd.com/1414/ https://xkcd.com/1414/ I suspect that in an alternate timeline without the internet or television we would have much lower literacy rates, and a public less informed about the real world. Most people would spend their time talking to one another, building more meaningful relationships, and believing in nonsense their friends and family relayed incorrectly. Maybe so many of us allow our attention span to be robbed, because so many more of us see the world for what it is, have resigned ourselves to our place in it, and would rather not think about these painful truths every day. Maybe if we kept sequestering knowledge on dead trees, only to be consumed by a small privileged audience and created by an even smaller more privileged group of creators blessed by institution, then more people would be blissfully unaware of the problems in the world and wouldn't crave distraction. I had another point but my adderall is wearing off and I can't remember.
- JackFr 4y agoI’m sympathetic to this argument to some extent… 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.
- bszupnick 4y agoI 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.
- chrsig 4y agowillpowering is a bad way to change any behavior. It's more or less a setup for failure. There are definitely ways to prepare and change a behavior with intention - limit time per day. if you find yourself going over, thats ok, note it, and put the phone down. - try uninstalling the app entirely -- make it harder for yourself to get the fix - schedule other activities that require you to be in the moment - give yourself positive reinforcement when you succeed. don't beat yourself up if you don't. - set very small goals, when you meet them, set some more very small goals > It's akin to saying "Just choose to read a book. Drop heroin". Sans the physical addition of heroin. You wont die from not getting to tweet at other twits. You wont die from binging after trying to stop tweeting, either.
- kaba0 4y agoWhile repeated often, Atomic Habits is a really great book I can wholeheartedly recommend. People really are habitual creatures. Willpower is very fickle, yet you likely don’t have to find any motivation to brush your teeth before bed, it just comes automatically.
- crooked-v 4y ago
- presentation 4y agoI 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!!!!
- ccn0p 4y agoyou put the the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-AH-ble.
- abledon 4y agoalt-tabbed out to the HN comments only 1/3rd of the way through, too long lol
- zephrx1111 4y agoIt is resorting to fear. I can keep reading online literature for hours and watching Netflix for days. It is not our attention that got shortened. Is is we were tolerant to borings before. Sometimes, boring is good.
- cbare 4y ago...by this website!
- MarkMarine 4y agoCan I get a TLDR please?
- raydiatian 4y agoTLDR this time is “Too long, don’t read”
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wpnx 4y agoOne concrete way of measuring this - how many of us here in comments skipped the article to read a summary
- steelframe 4y agoFor me at least, the medium matters. If the content is on a device where it is trivial to switch away to something else that could potentially be more "rewarding" to my brain, then every portion of said content must compete with everything else available to me on said device. If the content needs to lay some tedious groundwork to build up to something great, then on certain devices I have to fight through the urge to "flip away" to something else or skip over that part of the content, potentially compromising how I experience the content as a whole. This is why I recently spent some time to hack up a script to extract news stories into PDFs that I transfer onto an e-reader. I have a subscription to a news site, but I find it's just easier to just use a paywall bypass extension rather than log in when my cookie expires every day or so. I wrote a Python script to pull down the RSS feed for my news site, and with the modules html5_parser, lxml.etree, asyncio, pyppeteer, and slugify, in about 60 lines of code I've got something that displays the headlines one at a time in a console. Based on the headlines, I hit 'y' if I want to read it or 'n' to skip. It uses pyppeteer to fire up a recent build of Chromium, which runs in non-headless (headful?) mode in order to run extensions while still supporting print-to-PDF (patch for that landed July 22nd, hence the recent build to get it). I use xvfb so the Chromium window doesn't pop up on my window manager. Even though I pay for a subscription the news site still displays ads, so I block those with PiHole and the uBlock Origin extension. I have scripts to detect which /dev file my e-reader gets and to mount it. Then I print-to-PDF the news articles I want to read, saving to the e-reader. On quitting the script, it unmounts. I can grab the e-reader, find a cozy place away from my phones and tablets, and read through the articles without ads, animations, or other distractions, and without the ability to "flip away" to something else on the device I'm using. Of course all this took me the better part of a Saturday afternoon to get working as I slogged through all the hurdles -- print-to-PDF wasn't working in headful mode, but I needed headful mode to use the paywall-bypass and adblock extensions (solution: found the patch to get print-to-PDF work in headful mode happened in late July). The e-reader doesn't always get the same device file (solution: seek back in /var/log/messages to find the logs for my e-reader and use re package to pull out the device name). I couldn't figure out how to get asynchio to immediately fire off a thread when I hit 'y' on an article and didn't want to wait for a gather() on a bunch of tasks at the end of selecting articles, so I created my own threads and fired up my own event loops for asynchio to use, which is required for pyppeteer. Font was too small on my e-reader (solution: use 'scale': 1.5 in the page.pdf() parameters for pyppeteer). Finally I had to deal with the headful Chromium windows popping up and taking focus (solution: wrapper script to launch Chromium using xvfb-run). Of course this sort of thing is a lot more labored than just defaulting to clicking links in a web browser on the phone. But by now I feel that the environment is toxic to my ability to concentrate and avoid obnoxious content like animated ads, so it was worth it to me to spend a few hours to figure out how to shift the content onto a device that supports putting real time and attention into content intentionally selected. I plan on adapting this to pulling down other websites to my e-reader since there's nothing magic about my news site. Anything with RSS could theoretically work; I'd just need to tweak my parsing of the feed depending on its organization. And I'm certain there is an OSS solution that already does what I hacked together but in a smarter or more robust way.
- joshruby16 4y ago[dead]
- dmje 4y agoThe 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. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57933306-stolen-focus https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57933306-stolen-focus
- tomcam 4y ago> 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.
- omegacharlie 4y agoAnyone 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.
- chasd00 4y agoHobby related communities are usually quite healthy and exist on basic forum setups. A rocketry one I’m a part of stretches back decades. The community gets together at a couple of major launch events distributed across the nation. It’s a pretty amazing and close knit community.
- tommica 4y agoI've noticed with myself that sometimes if I want to go and find something in youtube, I really have to be careful to not look at the front-page - for some reason if I look at the suggestions, I just forget what I was there to search for, it is so frustrating.
- MaurizioPz 4y agothis might help https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/ (just a happy user)
- orbit7 4y agoFactorio or Satisfactory are my solution to this, great for re-training long duration singular focus. Good to disable social media and none essential notifications by default only enable when actually needed for something.
- benreesman 4y agoThere’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.
- baal80spam 4y agoAh, I KNOW what you did THERE ;-)
- kaba0 4y agoI will just leave it here: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp
- owisd 4y agoI think the problem with articles like that is they seem quite oblivious to people's actual complaints when they say their attention span is getting worse. If you spent 2 hours a day reading books 10 years ago and now you spend 2 hours a day doomscrolling then could make the case your 'average' attention span hasn't changed, but when people lament this change it's much more about the lack of any intentionality in doomscrolling for two hours vs reading for two hours. There's also a subtext of 'if we can't measure it it's not real', which you could apply to any mental health issue.
- kaba0 4y agoI don’t know — while I do often fall victim to doomscrolling/commenting/etc, what the article claims is true: I can equally well get sucked into some random niche topic I am enthusiastic about for hours on end. So my attention span is indeed not changed from when I read a book with multi-hundred pages in a sitting in my teenage years, it’s just that my motivation/interests are not the same anymore. And thus I have to disagree with you here - there is an issue that many people experience but to combat it we have to actually know the reason behind. Attributing it to something that may not even exist is harmful.
- _Algernon_ 4y agoThe lack of self-awareness by the author is honestly astonishing.
- raydiatian 4y agoIt’s fucking beautiful, this post belong in a museum of modern art.
- raydiatian 4y agoI 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.”
- ChoGGi 4y agoTiktok is one of the best examples of why infinite scrolling should be banned.
- netmonk 4y agoMay be it’s time discover and read Jacques Ellul. Also Michel Glouscard