Comment by vouwfietsman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vouwfietsman | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think that type of "modern Attention Span" is really criticized: If you do a 3 hour binge of tiktok, you could count that as a single span claiming your full attention, right? But nobody would say really that doing a 3 hour tiktok binge would make you a person with a great attention span.

I think the same applies to entertainment broadly: movies, podcasts, tv shows.

Instead I think that the real attention span is not consumer-based, but rather based on interaction with the subject matter. Simply put, I think the level of engagement with a material has to be on a certain level before you can claim it takes attention to consume it.

Yes, a Stranger Things season lasts 8 hours front-to-back, but if you zone out for an hour in between they're still looking for the alien mystery and they're not suddenly going to die because you didn't think along with all the plotpoints.

Contrast that with a university lecture, where if you zone out for 15 minutes you might never catch back up because you need to interact with the material in your head to be able to consume it properly.

I think that nuance is missing if you just say the words "attention span". "Attention" may just be the wrong word, and so I think nothing is really solidly refuted here, and I do indeed think that the attention span is dead.

The real issue here that original attention span is about moral or other judgement. It is about making claim of disapproval over media use rather then anything you could measure.

> Contrast that with a university lecture, where if you zone out for 15 minutes you might never catch back up because you need to interact with the material in your head to be able to consume it properly.

Zoning out university lecture was extremely normal when I was studying over 20 years ago. You did not died either. You kept making notes in a zombie like state and then reread the notes later on. Or you checked textbook or you asked friend for notes. It would be pretty rare for your memory to be the only source of learning later on.

There was no need to understand and acquire the lecture content right at place during lecture. In all likelihood, there was never ever such need.

The issue of boring lectures has been around a long time. Lectures of that sort seem somewhat obsolete anyway, probably it is more efficient to work in smaller class sizes with more video content. I greatly appreciated video lecture playback with variable speed, rewind.

With big lectures I remember details about the lecturer more than the class material. The professor's style, tone, gravitas. Their anecdotes.

An important part of the package there really is about marshaling student attention. Getting out of the home, going to a dedicated place of learning with others, restraints on distraction. Similar issues affect WFH/remote. Or various other psycho-hacks like wearing special uniforms, daily rituals.

Perhaps ADD correlates with cultural looseness around all such formality.

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