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How Tech Ate the Media and Our Minds (axios.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the story-of-our-lives dept.
From a report: On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount. We spend around 6 hours per day consuming digital media. As a result, the human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds since 2000, while the goldfish attention span is nine seconds. And we just mindlessly pass along information without reading or checking it. Columbia University found that nearly 60 percent of all social media posts are shared without being clicked on.
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How Tech Ate the Media and Our Minds More

How Tech Ate the Media and Our Minds

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  • FP! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:02PM (#53839659)

    tl;dr

  • fucking kids and millenials (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Glad I'm over 50 and know what life was before interwebz. Still do. Its grand. Not being tethered to a communication device, coming and going wherever and whenever I want. You poor, POOR, self-imposed attention-deprived kids. Your life, your childrens, and theirs will never know the freedom mankind has enjoyed for the last 100,000+ years. I pity you. Truly.
    • I'm not over 50, but remember that time very well and think this often. I guess I'll never know life solely after the interwep either (yes, I know I was born after the creation of the internet). I'm fully fluent in the technology, I'd bet more than the majority of the user, but never saw much of a point in most of it. Maybe it will be a long passing fad

    • Re:fucking kids and millenials (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:50PM (#53840109)

      I often think the same thing.

      When I graduated from highschool, cellphones didn't exist, neither did Microsoft or Apple and there was no publicly accessible internet.

      Spending time with my friends meant exactly that. Nobody was calling anyone else or checking messages 50 times a minute. Now I see groups of people who don't even look at or speak to each other. Sorry, I don't get it.

      • Re:fucking kids and millenials (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pr0fessor ( 1940368 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:42PM (#53840575)

        My son used to have a girlfriend that would facebook him while they were in the same room but rarely talked to him. It used to piss him off to no end she would come over and have her nose stuck in her cell phone the entire time then be mad that he didn't pay attention to her {aka he stopped checking her facebook posts because they were in the same room}

        One day I jokingly told him that if he was that unhappy he should just text her a break up while she was sitting next him with her nose stuck in her phone and that's eventually what happened.

    • The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.

      The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes fo

    • The generation before yours had grumpy old people who pitied your generation for all being glued to the television.

    • Glad I'm over 50 and know what life was before interwebz. Still do. Its grand. Not being tethered to a communication device, coming and going wherever and whenever I want. You poor, POOR, self-imposed attention-deprived kids. Your life, your childrens, and theirs will never know the freedom mankind has enjoyed for the last 100,000+ years. I pity you. Truly.

      I've seen my kids playing cards with their friends (and we didn't make them do it); so I say all is not lost.

  • I think... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:16PM (#53839819)

    I think I should comment on thi

  • V is for Vaccuous (Score:4, Informative)

    by mbeckman ( 645148 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:23PM (#53839863)
    "And we just mindlessly pass along information without reading or checking it."

    Such as this vaccuous story.

  • "As a result, the human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds since 2000, while the goldfish attention span is nine seconds."

    I'll bet that the evidence for this is rock solid.

    • TLDR

    • I asked a goldfish what he thought of the latest independent film I brought home, and he lost interest in nine seconds. Which is surprising because my friend, who by appearances I judge to be human, will discuss the film for hours. Obviously the fish is lacking in both an attention span and culture.

  • In other news.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lionchild ( 581331 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:41PM (#53840017) Journal

    And in other news today, the proliferation of social media has led to the decline of proof reading your posts, leaving out silly, little, unimportant words:

    On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount.

    Perhaps this might read better if it had a simple, little word in there:

    On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could BE three times that amount.

    Yes, I did read the article. They left the word out there too. Oh, the irony of it all!

  • Really? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bmimatt ( 1021295 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @12:47PM (#53840083)
    Speak for yourself, Sparky. Not all of us are FB zombies. There are dozens of us. DOZENS!

  • 6 hours of media per day? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Who the heck has time for wasting 6 hours per day on FB and friends?

  • Well, T.V. arguably ruined the mind of the older generation. The best people from that generation were the ones that self-limited their time in the common pursuits of the day. So, just don't do that and you'll be better than your peers.

    • TV shows run for about 180 seconds before there is an commercial break. But it's usually reality TV these days, which is a filming technique where they take hundreds of hours of footage and chop it up into a few hundred 15 second sound bites. It's découpage for TV studios.

    • One hundred percent insightful. No one who has a mission in life to be anything but a consuming unit spends all their time on FB or sat and watched TV all their lives. The fact that people are on here arguing, joking, trolling, having 2 cents worth suggests that they are not the zombies that the article defines.

  • I read the article (Score:5, Funny)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:07PM (#53840287) Homepage Journal

    And while it made some interesting pointsSQUIRREL

  • Ego Run Amok (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:10PM (#53840311)
    "nearly 60 percent of all social media posts are shared without being clicked on"

    Yeah, because it's now all about, "How does sharing this post make me look to my 'Friends'", Slacktivism, virtue-signalling and affirmation-seeking. Worldwide Digital Tribalism.

  • Ironic (Score:5, Informative)

    by Verdatum ( 1257828 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:10PM (#53840313)
    An article that uses the false fact that a goldfish has an attention-span/memory of nine seconds complains that it's harder than ever to know what articles can be trusted. It's not even good irony. It's just aggravating irony. The attention span statistic is cited to an article from Time, which cites it to a "study" by Microsoft, which cites it to some source called "Statistic Brain" [statisticbrain.com], which doesn't cite SHIT.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:30PM (#53840487)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Exaggeration (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Raven ( 30575 ) on Friday February 10, 2017 @01:32PM (#53840501) Homepage

    Our attention span has not reduced to 8 seconds. Heavy consumers of media and tech do not pay attention to non-interactive content (TV, ads), but are better at paying attention to interactive content (games, software). This is a shift of attention from passive consumers to active participants. When presented with passive content, tech users tune out... no surprise. But that's not the same as a globally reduced attention span.

    The full report [microsoft.com] is available.

  • Won't someone children think of!

  • They're going for the ironic share without reading. It's a good thing too - the article is complete shit.

  • "On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount. We spend around 6 hours per day consuming digital media."

    I would feel ashamed if I did either of those things at anywhere near that frequency.

    I don't check my phone unless it rings.
    I check my email maybe 5 or 6 times a day, sometimes more often if something is in process and needs attention.
    I don't check social media because I don't have any.

    And for the record, studies have shown that goldfis

  • ... they're saying it's time to bring back Short Attention Span Theater? [wikipedia.org]

  • And as a result of this, we are maturing more late than our parents did it. I saw an research that said that before, without this all technological advances and these social tools, people become mature when they were like 17 or 18 and now the range is among 24-26. I am the a clear example of what this new is talking about. I spend most of my days in front of the computer, mostly in Facebook and in Youtube, seeing a constant bombing of news that capture me and make me forget the real and important things in

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