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Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

theguardian.com

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Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#11

Post by Gunax »

I think it's a thoughtful tale, but I really cannot get behind the premise. Was our attention really stolen? Is this a literal claim, or just hyperbole?

It's a vice of the modern world. We have made food that tastes wo good, you want to eat forever. We have drugs which give you euphoria (for a time).

And, we have entertainment that is far better than before.

Well, for one I don't think there is anything particularly unique about the web. We have had 100 years of electronic entertainment. The sentiment used to be 'TV is rotting our brains'.

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#12

Post by wand3r »

This article was a tough read because of the meandering prose and weird personalization narrative they shoe-horned in.

> We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model

Cool that the Guardian flew this person to like 3 different locations for the story. Great conclusion. We could also solve poverty by giving everyone high paying jobs...

Tristan Harris is referenced in the article and I find his work on social media/attention to be very interesting.

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#13

Post by Liquix »

Stolen Focus (the book this article is an excerpt of) is a solid - if meandering - overview of society's rapidly declining attention span, featuring insight from behavioral psychologists, senior FAANG engineers, etc. It probably won't teach you anything new, but would make a great gift for the casual reader to get them asking questions about privacy.

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#14

Post by civilized »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #5

I think I would rather people choose to turn off their notifications, and uninstall social media rather than government intervention. It's a lot of work though. I recently did a factory reset of an Android tablet and, wow, it's quite a lot of work to get it to shut up. I also religiously disable any notifications on windows as well, but Microsoft have been making them a mandatory feature of some applications. Snip an…

I only allow push notifications for messages from loved ones. For any other app, the moment it sends me a notification it gets banned from pushing anything ever.

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#15

Post by wand3r »

throwaway_noone wrote: post #8

I read most of the article and then went outside for a cigarette.

Right? Frankly this is barely an exaggerated tl;dr:

My Godson was randomly obsessed with Elvis for one summer so years later I forced him to go to Graceland but he wanted to be on snapchat and also watches porn. I needed to understand why this happened so I traveled to 3 different continents to speak with experts but I won't tell you much about what they said. I vacationed to Provincetown and did a digital detox I saw on Oprah. Anyway we should just tell Google and Facebook to shutdown. We must fight for these rights like feminists fought for abortion rights (which they just lost) we can't blame ourselves for this problem, its systemic.

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#17

Post by mcpackieh »

anolog0 wrote: post #9

Why is it that every time this moral panic is written about, there are no solid studies to back it up? Surely, if there was really a society-wide epidemic of focus, there would be some clear metric for focus which researchers would have 20-30 years of data and studies on, right? This should be a very testable hypothesis, so where is all the hard science on it? Even in this article, the author just takes some statemen…

Turns out, a lot of people have their own opinions about society that aren't blessed and handed to them by social scientists.

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#18

Post by quickthrower2 »

wand3r wrote: post #15
throwaway_noone wrote: post #8

I read most of the article and then went outside for a cigarette.

Right? Frankly this is barely an exaggerated tl;dr: My Godson was randomly obsessed with Elvis for one summer so years later I forced him to go to Graceland but he wanted to be on snapchat and also watches porn. I needed to understand why this happened so I traveled to 3 different continents to speak with experts but I won't tell you much about what they said. I vacationed to Provincetown and did a digital detox I sa…

Thanks I needed a tl:dr; I definitely didn't have the attention span to read it all!

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#19

Post by quickthrower2 »

lencastre wrote: post #4
throwaway14356 wrote: post #2

you can persistently keep talking to people 7 days per week, drives them nuts but eventually they return to earth for as long as you keep it up. skip 3 days and all answers are humm uhh again, if you get any

What

text-ada-001?

Re: Attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen (2022)

#20

Post by throwaway14356 »

lencastre wrote: post #4
throwaway14356 wrote: post #2

you can persistently keep talking to people 7 days per week, drives them nuts but eventually they return to earth for as long as you keep it up. skip 3 days and all answers are humm uhh again, if you get any

What

i know people who only do screens, they cant have a conversation anymore, if you say something they don't hear you, if you poke them they say they are busy. seems reasonable until a year goes by without any conversation. then its fair to wonder where they went.

i don't normally keep talking if people rather not listen or participate but if i force it they produce short sentenced, then long ones, then dialogs and stories, make jokes, have a laugh. they stay that way as long as i maintain the effort. skip a week and they forget how to talk again

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