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Why is it that every time this moral panic is written about, there are no solid studies to back it up? Surely, if there was really a society-wide epidemic of fo

Why is it that every time this moral panic is written about, there are no solid studies to back it up? Surely, if there was really a society-wide epidemic of focus, there would be some clear metric for focus which researchers would have 20-30 years of data and studies on, right? This should be a very testable hypothesis, so where is all the hard science on it? Even in this article, the author just takes some statements from neuroscientists and a study on context-switching in order to make a bunch of unfounded conjecture.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Turns out, a lot of people have their own opinions about society that aren't blessed and handed to them by social scientists.
- convolvatron 3y ago
  which is all fine, desirable, and ultimately necessary. that doesn't mean that they make good arguments that help us try to decide what to do, convince other people, or even underscore the potential value of those opinions
  - smogcutter 3y ago
    HN: what, no research? Also HN: social science research is garbage and everyone who practices it is somewhere on a spectrum between delusion and fraud
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      It's almost as if HN isn't a monoculture.
      - smogcutter 3y ago
        I’ll need to see some research backing that up
yabatopia 3y ago
No need to panic: there is some research available. I found this article on The Verge an interesting read: Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter, https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps... . It links to an article in the New York Times, citing a study that lasted approximately 20 years. (No direct link, because paywall) Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.
- anolog0 3y ago
  Thanks for the response. That's an interesting study, but is it implying that we spend less time on websites because our attention spans are worse, or our attention spans are worse because most websites are more easily scanned, digested, and moved on from? Obviously the web itself has changed a lot in the past 20 years, not just people's supposed attention spans. Honestly, ignoring that entirely, I don't see why we would have to measure attention span through a metric like duration spent on websites. Is it really so hard to measure it just by giving people a task and paying attention to when their focus shifts from it? And, supposing people are generally just as good at sitting down and doing a task as they were 20 years ago (so long as they don't get interrupted by their phones), is there something else people mean when they talk about attention spans getting worse?
Falkon1313 3y ago
IIRC, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" had sources at the back. My copy is packed away and it's been awhile since I read it, so I could be wrong, but that's another that you might consider. "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" is about a different topic - disconnection from community and social interactions that we used to have, but it's an overlapping topic. It has lots of data and graphs.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Indeed, "Further Reading", p. 252 of the print edition: <https://archive.org/details/shallowswhatinte0000carr_r4d5/page/252/mode/2up?q=%22Further+Reading%22 https://archive.org/details/shallowswhatinte0000carr_r4d5/pa...>

mcpackieh 3y ago

Turns out, a lot of people have their own opinions about society that aren't blessed and handed to them by social scientists.

convolvatron 3y ago
which is all fine, desirable, and ultimately necessary. that doesn't mean that they make good arguments that help us try to decide what to do, convince other people, or even underscore the potential value of those opinions
- smogcutter 3y ago
  HN: what, no research? Also HN: social science research is garbage and everyone who practices it is somewhere on a spectrum between delusion and fraud
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    It's almost as if HN isn't a monoculture.
    - smogcutter 3y ago
      I’ll need to see some research backing that up

yabatopia 3y ago

No need to panic: there is some research available. I found this article on The Verge an interesting read: Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter, https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps... . It links to an article in the New York Times, citing a study that lasted approximately 20 years. (No direct link, because paywall) Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.

anolog0 3y ago
Thanks for the response. That's an interesting study, but is it implying that we spend less time on websites because our attention spans are worse, or our attention spans are worse because most websites are more easily scanned, digested, and moved on from? Obviously the web itself has changed a lot in the past 20 years, not just people's supposed attention spans. Honestly, ignoring that entirely, I don't see why we would have to measure attention span through a metric like duration spent on websites. Is it really so hard to measure it just by giving people a task and paying attention to when their focus shifts from it? And, supposing people are generally just as good at sitting down and doing a task as they were 20 years ago (so long as they don't get interrupted by their phones), is there something else people mean when they talk about attention spans getting worse?

Falkon1313 3y ago

IIRC, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" had sources at the back. My copy is packed away and it's been awhile since I read it, so I could be wrong, but that's another that you might consider. "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" is about a different topic - disconnection from community and social interactions that we used to have, but it's an overlapping topic. It has lots of data and graphs.

dredmorbius 3y ago
Indeed, "Further Reading", p. 252 of the print edition: <https://archive.org/details/shallowswhatinte0000carr_r4d5/page/252/mode/2up?q=%22Further+Reading%22 https://archive.org/details/shallowswhatinte0000carr_r4d5/pa...>