Have attention spans been declining?
There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters <i>must</i> reject more.<p>Yes, there are costs -- deep work &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&#x27;s committed to memory, and you don&#x27;t have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it&#x27;s beautiful to see.