Reading the paper mentioned, I also feel that we need more than just experience reports (e.g. comments and feelings in forums like hackernews) and controlled experiments.
Comprehension is down, yet I wonder about recall and the general amount of information we are processing. As we experience a lot of information in context, it might lead to a decrease in overall comprehension, yet a stronger recall on the bits we do remember. It would be super interesting to setup a larger scale in-situ study on the topic. Yet, I wonder how to get a baseline on that.
On the other hand, the latter are rare, and you don't even know it they're decent (lots of "landmark" studies get debunked years or decades later).
I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.
Still, I've had to push back against the expectation of being available 24/7 and responding immediately to everything. A text that goes unanswered for a few minutes becomes a phone call or three, to ask why I'm not responding. It's bloody exhausting sometimes.
It would be easy to say "today's movies aren't as interesting as the ones of 20 years ago" but that would be ignoring that I changed in those years - namely, I've seen a lot more movies and read a lot more books and watched a lot more TV.
It would be unsurprising for someone to say "not everything I liked at first still holds up today."
But I apply the same reasoning against my forward-looking watching/reading: "I've seen so much more now that fewer things impress me at first, as I have so much more to compare with."
So a book that's only mildly capturing my attention? I can speed up my reading, skim a bit more over the uninteresting parts. A movie? So much harder!
I can't say I really regret this change, I haven't noticed any real downsides. There's too much content and not enough time these days.
I think Movies just suck because TV shows are where all the good production is happening.
Making a good and compelling movie is really really hard, and now you can just churn out superhero stuff and make millions or do a TV show and have nearly none of the constraints of cinema.
The 90s was an odd period with countless great movies and massive budgets.
Attention is a task dependent context. I can drive for hours with no incident but be bored by a meeting in 5 minutes. Very little to link the two, because they're not the same by any metric outside of time. To average that out is oversimplying to absurdity.
Secondly, this myth has been debunked _thoroughly_. I don't have offhand access to the papers but I will add some write ups about it. But the state of attention report report 2018 is a good place to start if you feel like a Google hunt.
Third, most all of the theories around a shrinking attention span are based on unreplicated drivel. And it is drivel. Psychology is a new field still figuring out it's limits and medicine predates science and has a lot of falsehoods-presented-as-fact (this is a huge problem and contributes to the rise of anti vaxxers). Not a lot of evidence so much as opinions.
I find the idea that I comprehend something less than if i had it on paper to be hilarious. I grew up on screens, maybe I'm just accustomed to it, but i have decades of learning mundane and complex subject matter via various tech portals. There is so much evidence that this happens on a large enough scale to dismiss this nonsense here and now