So a view I see a lot nowadays is that attention spans are getting shorter, especially when it comes to younger generations. And the growing success of short form content on Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter for example seems to support this claim. I have a friend in their early 20s who regularly checks their phone (sometimes scrolling Tiktok content) as we’re watching a film. And an older colleague recently was pleased to see me reading a book, because he felt that anyone my age and younger was less likely to want to invest the time in reading.

But is this actually true on the whole? Does social media like Tiktok really mould our interests and alter our attention? In some respects I can see how it could change our expectations. If we’ve come to expect a webpage to load in seconds, it can be frustrating when we have to wait minutes. But to someone that was raised with dial-up, perhaps that wouldn’t be as much of an issue. In the same way, if a piece of media doesn’t capture someone in the first few minutes they may be more inclined to lose focus because they’re so used to quick dopamine hits from short form content. Alternatively, maybe this whole argument is just a ‘kids these days’ fallacy. Obviously there are plenty of young adults that buck this trend.

  • @[email protected]OP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    49 months ago

    Some great points! So you think that people’s capacity for attention hasn’t changed, but the types of media we’re exposed nowadays to can encourage us to change our behaviour toward consuming short form content? But if that content wasn’t available, they could happily move back toward longer form content?

    I do agree that short dopamine hits do make me feel good in the moment, but hollow after the fact. Longer, informative content does lodge itself more into my brain and provide longer lasting feelings of reward.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      29 months ago

      Yeah I think that’s about right, our capacity hasn’t changed this quickly, just the menu has changed to suit a quick fix appetite.

      People can and will still focus on longer form content, but maybe that’s their day job, so they want a bit of a release from in depth activity or ‘important’ information.

      I think there is a real danger here in some form… think about how you’d answer the question ‘what did you do on the weekend?’ That could easily be nothing or it could be I watched a great series called severance that explored the concepts of labour and our work and home lives as human beings