[ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
Subject: [ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

 

>.So what do you think? Do you think your attention span has decreased over
time? Do you think the attention spans of your associates and family members
has gone down?  Kelly

 

There is no doubt we are seeing decreased attention spans everywhere.
Before I get to that, this commentary postulates a related ability we have
gained as we have lost the ability to focus for long periods: the ability to
filter irrelevant info at a remarkable speed and effectiveness.

 

Evidence is abundant.  Consider such late 50s early 60s TV examples as Perry
Mason, which can now be viewed free:  

 

http://www.tv.com/shows/perry-mason/watch/the-case-of-the-final-fadeout-7964
0/

 

Note the long stretches between commercial breaks.  If you had the patience
to sit through these marvelous masterpieces to get to the courtroom
arguments, you will notice that it is difficult for us to follow: you need
to concentrate on what they are saying.  I loved this show as a 7 yr old
child.  Now I have a hard time sitting still long enough.  These shows were
once called dramas.  Now they wouldn't be called that; no helicopter chases,
no nothing, just heads talking.

 

Note Scientific American articles from the same era, compare with Scientific
American today.

 

Compare the general pace of movies from the 1940s with any movie made today,
the length of the scenes, the general depth of thought required.

 

Consider my favorite scientific writing, the seventh chapter of Darwin's
Origin of Species.  Think about what that man had to do in order to write
that chapter.  He had to sit quietly and watch, for hour after hour, ponder
what he was seeing, watch some more.  I am astonished by Darwin's
observational skills, beyond what is seen in scientists today.  We are
accustomed to things happening at a much faster pace.

 

This leads to the second conjecture: the internet and video games have made
us much more skilled at dealing with floods of data, figuring out how to
filter it and get just what we need.  I have a friend who is in his 70s, a
doctor (the one who introduced me to Dr. Christine Lajuenesse who was the
young lady who was shot by a crazy bastard and we sent the get-well wishes.)
This doctor had a very busy practice until a couple years ago, so he didn't
have much time for twiddling away the hours on the "internets" until very
recently.  I became his advisor and got him going after his semi-retirement.
He experienced the whole head rush most of us here experienced in the 90s
with all that free information now available right in our own homes.

 

There is a skill most of us developed twenty or more years ago as we learned
what a large fraction of all that information on the internet is bullshit.
Free and worth every penny.  We learned to figure out quickly what was
nonsense, what was speculation, what was solid fact, what was cool, etc.  We
have gotten good at it.

 

My son's generation started right out knowing they could find anything they
wanted to know on the internet, but that much of the info was wrong.  But I
saw something else cool: they seem to be really good at filtering out
peripheral info and focusing down on the critical stuff.  They go right to
the heart of the matter.  The evidence I found is in watching how the kids
play Mario Brothers.  I saw college students who orated at length on how
good they were at this Mario game or that.  Then when my second-grader son
and his friends wanted to play, they smote the astonished and appalled
college students, who went away with an entirely new and humble attitude,
thinking perhaps they weren't quite as good as they had previously thought.

 

I have an alternative explanation: as we grow older, we start to take in
more information and process more information.  The children focus right
down on the critical core.  To them, old people appear slow.  Not
necessarily stupid, just slower.  Reason: we are dealing with a lot more
information, and seeing a lot more alternatives simultaneously.

 

This theory explains why kids are effective programmers but that their
software isn't necessarily well designed.

 

If you are still reading down this far, I speculate that you are one of the
older guys here, one who doesn't give up after the second paragraph, tossing
it aside with a casual TLDR.

 

spike

 

 

  

 

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