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Decline of Attention-Span

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1

Anonymous: 2023-06-13 10:07:27

A number of scientists analyzed data from various sites on The Web, and found that attention -span has indeed been declining over the years:

"Sune and his colleagues wanted to understand what has been driving this change, so they built a complex mathematical model to try and figure it out."
"It's a bit like the systems used by climate scientists to predict the weather. It was designed to see what you could do to data to make it rise and fall at faster and faster rates, in ways that resemble the decline in collective attention they had been documenting."
"What they discovered is that there is one mechanism that can make this happen every time, You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it."
"It's a fascinating explanation of why this acceleration is happening' Sune told me. Today,'There's more information in the system.So if you think about 100 years ago, literally it would take time for news to travel.If there was some kind of huge catastrophe,in Norwegia,they would have to get down to Oslo, someone would write it up, it would slowly find it's way across the globe..."
"Compare that to current disasters , where they may be 'literally streaming live', and anyone could watch it, anywhere."

2

Anonymous: 2023-06-13 10:14:49

"One way of thinking about this, Sune said, is that at the moment, it is like we're 'drinking from a fire-hose-- there's too much coming at us' We are soaked in information. The raw figures on this have been analyzed by two other scientists, Dr martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California, and Dr Priscilla Lopez at the Open University of California."

"Picture reading an eighty-five page newspaper. In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being--TV,radio,reading--it amounted to forty newspapers-worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up."

"How is this change affecting us? Sune smiled when I asked. 'There's this thing about speed that feels great..Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it's awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it.'"

"But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion."

3

Anonymous: 2023-06-13 10:24:09

"'It becomes exhausting.'.More importantly, Sune said, 'What we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions...Depth takes time.And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there's no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering. It's pulling us more and more up onto the surface.'"

4

Anonymous: 2023-06-13 10:26:12

"Sune is an affable Dane, but when I asked him where we are headed,his smile turned into a pucker. 'We've been accelerating for a long time,and for sure, we're getting close to whatever limit we have.' he said, This acceleration can't continue indefinitely, he said. There's some physical limit to how fast things can move.It must stop at some point, But I don't see any slowing down now."

"Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photo of Mark Zuckerberg., standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing VR headsets.He was the only person standing in actual reality,looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, 'Holy shit--this is a metaphor of the future'"

"If we don't change course, he fears we are headed for a world where 'there'll be an upper class of people that are aware of risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of society with fewer resources to resist the manipulation and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more."

"Once he learned this, Sune deeply changed his own life. He abandoned all social media, except Twitter, which he checks only once a week, on Sunday. He stopped watching TV. He stopped getting his news from social media, and instead took out a newspaper subscription. He read many more books instead."

"'As you know, everything with self-discipline is not like it's a thing you fix and then it's fixed forever. He said. 'I think the first thing to realize is that it's an on-going battle.' But he told me it had helped to trigger a philosophical shift in how he approached life."

"'In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult. What's happening with out cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.' I wanted to give myself a chance at choosing something that's more difficult."

-Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari.

5

Anonymous: 2023-06-14 06:40:14

Will probably read this when I can pay attention for 5 secs

6

Anonymous: 2023-06-14 07:02:18

>The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

Assuming increased information directly leads the brain to reduce attention spans, it technically does the right thing in preserving the ability to engage with a significant portion of it.

>Sune deeply changed his own life. He abandoned all social media, except Twitter, which he checks only once a week, on Sunday. He stopped watching TV. He stopped getting his news from social media, and instead took out a newspaper subscription. He read many more books instead.

Consciously removing information sources corrects the case of net-negatively informing media. It is therefore not usage of these media themselves that reduces attention spans, but their sabotage of ones natural content curation through network effect, addiction potential and ux design.

7

Anonymous: 2023-06-14 07:12:48

>>6
Yes, later on in thew book the author talks about how current social media technologies are designed to overwhelm you with information and interrupt your focus.

Obviously few people will be willing to totally abandon these technologies, but he argues that they can be massively overhauled towards reducing attention problems, if companies can be given the right incentives. Banning surveillance capitalism (data tracking, targeted advertising and such), may be a start.

8

Anonymous: 2023-06-14 08:11:51

>>7

>Obviously few people will be willing to totally abandon these technologies, but he argues that they can be massively overhauled towards reducing attention problems, if companies can be given the right incentives. Banning surveillance capitalism (data tracking, targeted advertising and such), may be a start.

EU data protection laws are presently for the benefit for consumers, yet i suspect they are mainly motivated by local economic interests and will be overwhelmingly attacked when the EU cultivates a corresponding ecosystem of predatory platforms (think of it like economic protectionism incidentally protecting against harmful products).

There is a major possibility of platforms facing momentary lapses in their ability to entrap their users, especially in their recent monetization drive. These platforms can only fall, if a major effort is made in siphoning their users to less harmful alternatives at these times.
What constitutes less harmful may vary by a lot. Redditors are migrating to lemmy and kbin. These services change nothing to make it more conducive to discussion. Still they freeze the design in its current state, are self hostable at least in the capacity gitlab is and support federating among instances.
The important thing is forcing the average user to face the risks of these platforms. Once the carefully engineered approach of social media companies is undermined, confronting surveillance capitalism becomes a possibility.

9

Anonymous: 2023-06-14 10:19:55

>>8

>Redditors are migrating to lemmy and kbin

Oy vey, what happened?