<story><title>Have attention spans been declining?</title><url>https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/07/24/your-mystery-have-attention-spans-been-declining/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway2037</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I see this written so frequently.  Is there any studies to back up this claim?  Please forgive me: Normally, I abhor the &amp;quot;citation please&amp;quot; type of response, but this claim is misleading to me.  It just sounds like grumpy old person complaining about speed of the world and young(er) people.&lt;p&gt;Example: I tried Googling for &amp;quot;does consuming short content make it harder to focus on longer content?&amp;quot;.  None of the content is scientific research, just a bunch of blowhards writing &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s never been worse&amp;quot; blog posts.</text></item><item><author>mlyle</author><text>The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know for sure about causation, but the students that I see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and working context in a very short time.  It&amp;#x27;s a very strong correlation.&lt;p&gt;(And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us who have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we&amp;#x27;re accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly presented snap-edited bullshit that we don&amp;#x27;t have time to adequately question is high).&lt;p&gt;Developing some skills requires focus and careful study.  We&amp;#x27;re robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.</text></item><item><author>jjoonathan</author><text>There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters &lt;i&gt;must&lt;/i&gt; reject more.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are costs -- deep work &amp;amp; study both suffer -- but there are benefits too: informational content that can be compressed does get compressed. An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video and then a 30 second tiktok, by which point it has become a snap cut between the critical actions and finger-wag followed by pitfalls. You can look it up, watch it multiple times until it&amp;#x27;s committed to memory, and you don&amp;#x27;t have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it&amp;#x27;s beautiful to see.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aerbil313</author><text>You can try yourself. Use the most short-form content media: either one of HN, reddit and tiktok for 8 hours per day for one week. I can guarantee you won’t be able to concencrate on &lt;i&gt;anything&lt;/i&gt; after the one week.</text></comment>
<story><title>Have attention spans been declining?</title><url>https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/07/24/your-mystery-have-attention-spans-been-declining/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway2037</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
I see this written so frequently.  Is there any studies to back up this claim?  Please forgive me: Normally, I abhor the &amp;quot;citation please&amp;quot; type of response, but this claim is misleading to me.  It just sounds like grumpy old person complaining about speed of the world and young(er) people.&lt;p&gt;Example: I tried Googling for &amp;quot;does consuming short content make it harder to focus on longer content?&amp;quot;.  None of the content is scientific research, just a bunch of blowhards writing &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s never been worse&amp;quot; blog posts.</text></item><item><author>mlyle</author><text>The flip side is that when people get used to consuming content in 30 second blipverts, they become unable to maintain attention through a 10 second break in the action.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know for sure about causation, but the students that I see incessantly consume tiktok completely lose state and working context in a very short time.  It&amp;#x27;s a very strong correlation.&lt;p&gt;(And, I disagree a bit with your premise: for those of us who have become literate at skimming directions, the 30 second tiktok is still slower and more context-switch heavy than we&amp;#x27;re accustomed to... also, the risk that the tiktok is just quickly presented snap-edited bullshit that we don&amp;#x27;t have time to adequately question is high).&lt;p&gt;Developing some skills requires focus and careful study.  We&amp;#x27;re robbing youth of the patience needed to conquer these skills.</text></item><item><author>jjoonathan</author><text>There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters &lt;i&gt;must&lt;/i&gt; reject more.&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are costs -- deep work &amp;amp; study both suffer -- but there are benefits too: informational content that can be compressed does get compressed. An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video and then a 30 second tiktok, by which point it has become a snap cut between the critical actions and finger-wag followed by pitfalls. You can look it up, watch it multiple times until it&amp;#x27;s committed to memory, and you don&amp;#x27;t have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it&amp;#x27;s beautiful to see.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Spooky23</author><text>I doubt there are controlled studies, but you can probably make a reasonable hypothesis based on viewing habits at different ages. Old people in 1993 watched Bonanza reruns; in 2023 they’re hooked to the constant crisis of cable news.&lt;p&gt;Anecdotally, I’ve definitely seen a shift in corporate comms as people gravitate to IM and text as opposed to email, driven both by habit and by avoiding accountability as email audit has become common.</text></comment>