Have attention spans been declining?
There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more.Yes, there are costs -- deep work & 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's committed to memory, and you don't have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it's beautiful to see.