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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

I'm definitely interested in the feeling of 'My attention span is gone' - I feel this sometimes as well, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame it on tech. Probably worth a deeper dive.

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Gio's avatar

Checkout the books Attention Span by Gloria Mark and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. The first has lots of science the second adds some social commentary (albeit a bit partisan). Together they give lots of food for thought

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

Thanks for the suggestions, will check these out!

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Gazeboist's avatar

Consider how the information surface of, say, a town has changed from the invention of radio to the full rollout of the internet. Prior to mass media, information was trapped in linearly scaling flows, traveling over roads and rivers to enter a location. Now it travels more or less freely in the 2.5D space we live in, resulting in a multiplicative stepup in the rate at which information crosses more or less any boundary.

That's the difference, I think - we've moved from a context of information scarcity to one of information saturation, and we don't quite know how to handle it or what a reasonable perspective looks like. I actually think the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics you've brought up a couple of times is a sort of half-formed attempt at dealing with this: it is flatly impossible to deal with every moral crisis in the world. Accepting this, we try to stop blaming people for failing to solve problems they are distant from. But without more refinement, we still end up blaming people for accidentally finding themselves in proximity to a problem and not having a perfect solution ready to go.

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Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

I do think this is key - the scale of modern social media makes normal social pressures turbocharged, for both better or worse.

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