Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha why?
Here’s the intro to Twin Peaks... https://youtu.be/i7d0Lm_31BE
It is happening again.
It is happening again.
The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter
#52I think it's telling that those in tech, including billionaire execs like Jobs, were/are very sensitive to the usage of tech devices by their kids. Addiction to games, news, apps, entertainment is real, but that's only half the issue. It fosters this itch where we can't linger on uncomfortable thoughts without instinctively grabbing our phone to be distracted. This include when we're trying to really go deep on a sub…
Remember too that many billionaires are control freaks. Them policing their children's screen time may just be part of larger control regime. Lots of rich people, going back to most every king/queen in history, have been what we would today call overprotective parents. Tech royalty isn't any different.
I grew up with some very wealthy people, and the richer the parents the more absentee/oblivious the parenting in my experiences.
Re: The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter
#53(First, this article is not about individual attention span: it's about an increase in volume of content and the consequently dwindling amount of time the collective public has to dwell on a given piece of published content.) Anyway, this brings to mind one good thing about Hacker News: while breaking stories make it to the front page, so does older content worthy of discussion. We need more people to care about cura…
>good thing about Hacker News: while breaking stories make it to the front page, so does older content worthy of discussion. Yea, I also trust a democracy of people to highlight what's important or interesting more than corporate news. Or at least, as a complement to it.
I don't know that HN is a democracy at all. I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day.
I guess having a check like that is a good thing. Take reddit for example, people usually post third hand articles because the primary source is probably a paywalled article from a proper journalism outlet, and posts are subjected to sweeping vote manipulation. It's not a cultural cross section either, the types of people who post on reddit are a vast minority; I wouldn't be suprised if it was less than 5% of users. And users of sites like reddit/HN are not representative at all of the country or the world really. These sites heavily skew towards the educated, high income, male, and white, so you miss out on a lot of valuable perspective if you only use these sorts of sites.
Re: The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter
#54This article really isn't saying attention span is getting shorter ( or it's misunderstanding what "attention span" means ). It's that global interest timeframe is getting shorter ( aka how long a product or news is relevant is shrinking because we are getting more product, news, etc ). "The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion tweets and analyzed the top 50 trending hashtags in the world every hour on the hour, f…
I think its ridiculous hyperbole to call this a global phenomenon if they are looking at tweets. Less than a quarter of Americans use the site, a proportion that skews educated/wealthy/white, and of all twitter users something like 8% of accounts are responsible for 80% of tweets.
So why is so much being written and thought and discussed about whats really just the rampant spam of maybe 2% of Americans? Probably because twitter has a ticker.
Re: The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha why?
In case this is a serious question and not a joke (unclear which it is) then he may be saying that older movies and shows had these longer intros that seemed normal at the time, but if you watch them again now they seem long and boring now. So that is one to show how your attention span has become shorter
You'd also watch a show one episode a week unless it was on reruns. It used to be almost impossible to watch TV for 4+ hours because at certain times of the day, absolutely nothing worth watching was even on.
Re: The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
>good thing about Hacker News: while breaking stories make it to the front page, so does older content worthy of discussion. Yea, I also trust a democracy of people to highlight what's important or interesting more than corporate news. Or at least, as a complement to it.
I don't know that HN is a democracy at all. I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day. I guess having a check like that is a good thing. Take reddit for example, people usually post third hand articles because the primary source is probably a paywalled article from a proper journalism outlet, and posts are subjected to sweeping…
> "I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day."
I haven't observed behavior like this. HN does have dedupe behavior that prevents the same piece being submitted multiple times within some time frame. How this looks to the duplicate submitter is that upon clicking "submit", rather than creating a new submission, it redirects you to original. This could appear that it's getting submitted by some other account, but isn't what actually happened.
Re: The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what do you do during the downtime? Nothing?
Sure. I think meditation has become popular specifically because we no longer just do "nothing" anymore, so people need to now dedicate time to doing nothing, just like we devote time to fitness. Evolutionarily speaking, I imagine humans spent vasts amount of time doing nothing over the past few million years - so one would think that it could be somehow vital to our physiology. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out…
I suspect people in the past were mostly doing nothing in the company of other people (family, tribe), which is a social activity in itself, and thus very different than laying in bed and staring at the ceiling all alone (this is how I imagine doing nothing looks like for people without a family).