The lack of self-awareness by the author is honestly astonishing.
Our attention span is being robbed
141–150 of 161 posts
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#142I find it amusing how the writing style even feels like it's made to be skimmed, the whole thing is broken into tweet-sized paragraphs and every third word is CAPITALIZED to draw your EYE to the EMPHASIS!!!!
you put the the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-AH-ble.
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#143I found this article to be sardonically meta and utterly ironic. Brilliant if intentional, hilarious if not.
The article leaks out in a rambling stream of consciousness to accuse social media of being exactly what social media professes to be: a (drum roll) stream of consciousness.
The article implicitly challenges us to stick with reading it, something it accuses social media of doing as well.
The icing on the cake is the end where our protagonist concludes “what can we do about social media robbing us of our time? Share this article!”
And here I am, my time utterly wasted, posting a comment about how fucking stupid it is.
Is this post-post modern art?
A feint within a feint within a feint withi…
“This should be put in a museum for crazy people.”
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#144The lack of self-awareness by the author is honestly astonishing.
It’s fucking beautiful, this post belong in a museum of modern art.
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#145Honestly, it's articles like this that lead me to be so stingy with my attention. I wanted to close the tab a third of the way into the article not because I'm incapable of paying attention, but because the article was wasting my time by shoving the same simple point into my face over and over again with no evidence or interesting implications. I will pay attention to articles with a reasonable density of information…
My favorite take from 2015: http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-b... To the point and consistent.
That is a very good take, wow. This piece emphasized what I've been missing from the usual discussion of advertisements: that it's ultimately unethical to influence people is such a way. Especially considering the techniques that marketing employs.
"There is no paid version of Facebook."
There's only paid versions of cable television, and yet it's jam-packed with advertisements, to the absolute detriment of the programming itself. There's never a guarantee to avoid advertisement, since it's working so well in influencing people, and influence is power and money. Advertising is also a race for attention - entities risk their status or even existence, if they are not advertising, because if they voluntarily don't advertise, their competition surely will.
Regulation could help here, but I'm not holding my breath. So what remains is user side blocking, as much as we can.
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#146I will just leave it here: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp
I think the problem with articles like that is they seem quite oblivious to people's actual complaints when they say their attention span is getting worse. If you spent 2 hours a day reading books 10 years ago and now you spend 2 hours a day doomscrolling then could make the case your 'average' attention span hasn't changed, but when people lament this change it's much more about the lack of any intentionality in doomscrolling for two hours vs reading for two hours. There's also a subtext of 'if we can't measure it it's not real', which you could apply to any mental health issue.
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#147I will just leave it here: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790.amp
I think the problem with articles like that is they seem quite oblivious to people's actual complaints when they say their attention span is getting worse. If you spent 2 hours a day reading books 10 years ago and now you spend 2 hours a day doomscrolling then could make the case your 'average' attention span hasn't changed, but when people lament this change it's much more about the lack of any intentionality in doo…
I don’t know — while I do often fall victim to doomscrolling/commenting/etc, what the article claims is true: I can equally well get sucked into some random niche topic I am enthusiastic about for hours on end. So my attention span is indeed not changed from when I read a book with multi-hundred pages in a sitting in my teenage years, it’s just that my motivation/interests are not the same anymore.
And thus I have to disagree with you here - there is an issue that many people experience but to combat it we have to actually know the reason behind. Attributing it to something that may not even exist is harmful.
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#148Anyone else feel pessimistic about the future of internet communities given the decline of places like IRC and bulletin boards where one could make real social connections with special interests compared to the rise of 'walled garden' social media with synthetic content to please some techbro algorithm and most users being passive observers? Do not know the answer but I do not like where this bodes for the future of…
Hobby related communities are usually quite healthy and exist on basic forum setups. A rocketry one I’m a part of stretches back decades. The community gets together at a couple of major launch events distributed across the nation. It’s a pretty amazing and close knit community.
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#149Honestly, it's articles like this that lead me to be so stingy with my attention. I wanted to close the tab a third of the way into the article not because I'm incapable of paying attention, but because the article was wasting my time by shoving the same simple point into my face over and over again with no evidence or interesting implications. I will pay attention to articles with a reasonable density of information…
Agreed. I gave up reading part way through, not because of the simplicity of the examples but because of the triviality of the evidence. Writing worth reading takes a lot of work. It means reading the draft and trimming the cruft. It means taking the time to do research on the relevant points.
Re: Our attention span is being robbed
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite resources for "mindfulness": 1. Believe in Jesus 2. Explore contemplative traditions of Hesychasm, Centering Prayer, Hesychasm, Carmelite mystics, etc. If you attempt to divorce mindfulness meditation from spirituality or even from experience of a transcendent Divinity, you're asking for trouble.
What about Buddha, or Brahma, or Zeus? Do those work as well?
Yes!