Nothing has changed

I don't believe anything has changed neurologically or psychologally in the last decades.

There have always been people who are more susceptible to consume "trashy" (provoking, easy to consume) media.

Once it was low-quality newspapers (a german band once refered to them as "fear, hate, tits and the weather forecast", which fits really well!), then it was trash TV, then mobile games, and now TikTok and stuff. Some people are just attracted to flashy stuff and can't get enough dopamine.

It's just that the latter example is very new, and everything new is automatically bad, no matter what.

There have always been young people who read books, create art, video game, listen or create music, have hobbies, and so on.

BUT, something has changed:

One word: attention economy. Capitalism realized, that especially in combination with ads, you can create A LOT of money by making easy to consume content.

If a platform uses dark patterns (emotional or funny content, reinforcement, short content instead of longer stuff, flashy stuff, likes, endless scrolling, keeping you as long as possible in the app, etc.), it makes a lot more money with it's users.

Years of algorithms perfectionized manipulating you and your attention span with supernatural stimuli (as mentioned above).

What to do with those informations?

Notice, how boring Lemmy, RSS-feeds, and stuff like that are?

After checking my posts for this day, I'm done and do something different, like cleaning the kitchen. Now, I'm on the toilet and don't have anything else to do, and I have fun answering you :)

That's how our devices should work. I don't wanna be a slave, I want to own my device, and not the other way around.

Tbh, I'm grateful Reddit went downhill. A year ago I could never imagine nuking my account.

I spent my whole teenage and now adult years (15 - now) on that shithole, was super addicted and couldn't spend 2 minutes without checking my phone, even in meetings, dates, and so on. It was just as bad as vaping for me. I knew, that it was slowly killing every brain cell, but "loved" it too much.

Thanks, u/spez ❤️ You killed Reddit for me and made my new "Reddit" (-> Lemmy, but with the same app) THAT boring for me I bought an e-reader now to read books instead😂

Tldr? /s

Try reading a book for 5 hours in the city surrounded by your devices, and try doing it in nature with no devices around you. We didn't change, but our world did and we adapt with it. Of course, things wouldn't be so bad if there weren't people getting unimaginably rich by trapping your attention.

It's genuinely more effective in today's society to skim read and give up if the content isn't good. There is so much time wasting bullshit, misinformation, ads, and scams put in front of us. But we don't have a great defense mechanism, so our attention spans have suffered alongside the quickening of our skepticism response.

There's a great book that covers this called The Shallows. Basically, they argue yes. Internet is designed in such a way to keep you clicking and scrolling. As people have used internet devices while their brains are forming we are likely shaping those brains to a more distractible form.

I remember when I was a kid they'd discuss teens as the "MTV generation", kids who didn't really watch TV, they just watched music videos, and even then there was scrolling news down the bottom and boxes would pop up on the side showing different things. They said kids had attention spans of 12 seconds and it would cause massive issues with finding work and being productive as adults.

I'm in my 30's now and I've heard the same thing about every generation since.

It seems that the real issue is that teenagers have short attention spans and adults have amnesia.

Yes behaviourally, no empirically.

You get a positive dopamine reactive from viewing multiple short form content pieces in succession, you get an arguably more valuable serotonin reaction from viewing a more in depth piece and maybe feeling like you learned something.

How you’re affected by these feelings of satisfaction will influence your behaviour. I recently compared mine and my wife’s weekends, she’d watched a lot of short form content and couldn’t remember a thing, felt empty from it, I’d watched a series of a tv show and could talk about the story and concepts.

But that’s not all there is to it, Plato argued that the written world would dumb people down because they no longer had to remember things and pass them on vocally, maybe a decrease in the requirement for individual cognition, but obviously an overall good.

Edit: edit was messing with me so I couldn’t add this til now. I’m just a drunk guy enjoying dinner and browsing Lemmy, what you’re looking for is the simple answer, the dopamine hit, a minimal conversation. Put your attention span to the test and look into some open access research on the subject, it’ll be fun! And its all that seperate us from the YouTubers that we venerate so much

Mine certainly is.

If you want to compare your attention span to what it once was, try watching older media. The wife and I were watching the walking dead and I was getting bored and that's only 10 years old. Try watching 2001: A Space Odyssey without any distractions. It's torture.

And the growing success of short form content on Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter for example seems to support this claim.

You can't really make a conclusion from this. Maybe our short attention span is the reason short form content is so popular.

I guess it's not our attention span declining, but just that we are not used to waiting or getting bored.

I can't stand tiktok, Instagram or any of those short video sites.

I still watch hour long YouTube videos of dudes working on cars and documentaries talking about the most random things you can imagine.

People are getting dumber and their attention span sucks

i remember Michael Stevens saying in an interview with Anthony Padilla that the subway surfers gameplay concept isnt really new and we've been doing the same thing for ages, rather than subway surfers while listening to some bot read reddit posts, people were listening to their friends while looking at birds or animals at a zoo, or even getting heavily intoxicated to help converse with your friends.

and people have said that people are getting dumber but i think theyre just young let them grow up then compare. we have been laughing at stupid ass jokes, shitty songs and toilet humour since the beginning of time.

people from the 13th century might be saying that we're lazy for not making our clothes by and settling for an inferior product made by machines, but in the grand scheme, does it really matter that much?

It's almost like you started reading this Time Article but never finished.

Or maybe this sciences times article

While the consensus is out about whether or not or attention spans are really shortening, most sources say whatever is going on, isn't permanent...yet.

We still have the ability to unplug and find something that's truly interesting to us, something that we care about, and focus on it. We just have to find it, and then, actually do it.

Tl;dr

My tolerance for wasting my time has changed. I have more access to more relevant content closer to my interests, so why should I waste my time with older forms of media that are poorly aligned with me.

If it has, it has only been a recent phenomenon. Hell, the need for a large portion of the population to concentrate for a long period of time is a recent development.

Attention spans are only really an issue where attention was economically valuable.

First results after a few minutes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790

"No evidence of shrinking"

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/are-attention-spans-really-collapsing-data-shows-uk-public-are-worried-but-also-see-benefits-from-technology

"We can't tell"

I can only speak for myself, and am not a teen, but I can tell you I used to be able to, but can no longer: hear a person's phone number once and memorize it, remember 4-5 directional turns without writing it down, watch a 2 hour movie I'm not enthralled with, stare at traffic or people walking by and not be upset I'm wasting my time.

I think it's more the access to knowledge and productivity that has changed our society's concept of what needs to be remembered or what we should spend our thought on, than it is a generational neuro-difference.

I can't comment outside of personal experience, but I noticed my retention has gotten incredibly short. I have this little slab constantly calling for my attention and won't let me focus on anything for a long period of time. Then, because of the convenience of storing everything electronically and having it in that same little slab, I have noticed that I can't really remember much. However, as of late, I have taken up journaling and writing everything down with pen and paper, and this has allowed me to remember and focus better on things.

I have heard that because writing is slower than typing things, it gives more time for our brains to memorize them. Also, I have turned off all notifications and left all social networks, and I can feel more engaged in whatever is going on in my real life.

I'd think it's more that there's now more media fighting your attention. When I was a kid (GenX here), we had a handful of TV channels and books. Books was what I went with.

Nowadays, I get home from work and watch something on YouTube before bed. I still read, but my standards have risen, and a trashy space opera won't do it anymore for me. It has to be a great one now, and there are fewer of them. So, naturally, YouTube gets a bigger share of my time. Or games, when I have time to play on the weekends. My comfort game used to be Civilization, and currently I'm hooked on Baldurs Gate.

I don't know anything about it from a scientific ground but I know about myself. I am what ai consum. I'm also a big fan of boredom because it activates creativity. The more I leave my phone in my pocket when I've got nothing to do, the more creative I get. I believe that this also plays into having longer attention spans. But not completly sure how. Maybe somebody else has an idea?