Abundance of Information Narrows our Collective Attention Span:
The negative effects of social media and a hectic news cycle on our attention span has been an ongoing discussion in recent years—but there's been a lack of empirical data supporting claims of a 'social acceleration.' A new study in Nature Communications finds that our collective attention span is indeed narrowing, and that this effect occurs not only on social media, but also across diverse domains including books, web searches, movie popularity, and more.
Our public discussion can appear to be increasingly fragmented and accelerated. Sociologists, psychologists, and teachers have warned of an emerging crisis stemming from a 'fear of missing out,' keeping up to date on social media, and breaking news 24/7. So far, the evidence to support these claims has only been hinted at or has been largely anecdotal. There has been an obvious lack of a strong empirical foundation.
In a new study, conducted by a team of European scientists from Technische Universität Berlin, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, University College Cork, and DTU, this empirical evidence has been presented regarding one dimension of social acceleration, namely the increasing rates of change within collective attention.
"It seems that the allocated attention in our collective minds has a certain size, but that the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed. This would support the claim that it has, indeed, become more difficult to keep up to date on the news cycle, for example." says Professor Sune Lehmann from DTU Compute.
[...] "Our data only supports the claim that our collective attention span is narrowing. Therefore, as a next step, it would be interesting to look into how this affects individuals, since the observed developments may have negative implications for an individual's ability to evaluate the information they consume. Acceleration increases, for example, the pressure on journalists' ability to keep up with an ever-changing news landscape. We hope that more research in this direction will inform the way we design new communication systems, such that information quality does not suffer even when new topics appear at increasing rates."
More information: Philipp Lorenz-Spreen et al. Accelerating dynamics of collective attention, Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09311-w
Also at EurekAlert!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 16 2019, @02:02AM (12 children)
I remember when "knowledge" was locked up in Libraries and Universities, hard to access, harder still to understand without expensive guidance.
Today, you can take graduate level courses from the likes of MIT online, for free, and almost nobody cares - information overload in the extreme. The opportunity for learning has exploded in the last 20 years, but the actual application of all this available knowledge isn't apparently changing too much too fast, at least not from the perspective of inside the US / Europe.
The popular internet destinations: social media, (porn), would seem to indicate people's true interests - the things that drive the dopamine centers the strongest. Very few people seem to care about investing effort for long term returns, it's more about what can get that next shot of satisfaction the fastest.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday April 16 2019, @02:33AM (5 children)
Even more so when the long term returns aren't guaranteed (as with any type of investment).
Which brings it to the core of the problem: education seen from strictly utilitarian perspective, with the "economy" as the goal. Becomes a reductionist approach and, what's worse, slides so easy on path of confusing education and taming a monkey/operant conditioning (the fuck with arts, philosophy and critical thinking, just tell me how to do a job).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Tuesday April 16 2019, @04:29AM (4 children)
You want your cake and to eat it too. If education is useful, then it is useful in that way on a strictly utilitarian perspective (surely, the ability to think and reason, knowledge of the fields you mentioned, etc would have value in a job too). (Incidentally, I don't think "economy", here, has any additional resolving value since any utilitarian goals for optimizing an economy are just utilitarian goals.) It's very convenient for supposed supporters of education to denigrate people who seek near future use for their education, but that is part of the point of the education.
What really is the core of the problem is that we have a lot of education which is not valuable in any sense. It's not good for getting jobs, or getting people who can think. We should think about why education can fail that hard.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday April 16 2019, @05:15AM (3 children)
Nope. You see the economy as an end, I see it (including holding a job) only as a mean to an end.
What utilitarian value do you assign on, say, kintsugi wares [wikipedia.org] or sand mandalas [wikipedia.org] or extreme ironing [wikipedia.org] or underwater basket weaving [wikipedia.org]?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 16 2019, @01:39PM
What is the definition of an economy [oxforddictionaries.com]?
It's just a giant means in the first place. And how successful it is is already measured in utilitarian terms.
Considerable value in some of these cases since people desire to create and/or own them (in such cases as when ownership makes sense).
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday April 17 2019, @01:17AM (1 child)
Today I learned that there is an Extreme Ironing Bureau.
I don't know about usefulness to my job, but the people where I work will get a kick out of it!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 17 2019, @01:25AM
See also Wok racing [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @05:31AM (1 child)
If you sit in front of computer 8 hours at work slaving away burning your long-chain gloans trying to slap some bandaids on a shitstorm Pajeet left behind, when you get home the last thign you want to do is a 4-hour lecture on the new "hot shit" JS front-end mvc library. I rather watch some retarded shit that does not make one brain-cell tingle.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 17 2019, @01:28AM
If you're cleanup crew for Pajeet in an organization that just wants you to apply bandaids, you need to examine your options. If you don't have any, that hot shit new library just might be your ticket to get a few.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:24AM
FTFUs. The "success" ratio for MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) is somewhere around 6%. [harvard.edu] Graduate courses are too long. Tl:dr. So riddle me this, Batperson, cause or effect?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday April 16 2019, @02:31PM (2 children)
Is it? Or is it just a change in how we acquire that information?
The way I see it, there's two sides to education. There's answering your own questions, and there's certification of knowledge. The MIT online courses aren't really going to provide any certification of knowledge -- you can't get a degree by taking those courses and they don't give you a certificate of completion that you can show your boss. So the only reason to take that course is to satisfy your own curiosity. But is an MIT course really the most effective way of doing that these days? If you want to understand how a jet engine works, are you going to go take some physics and engineering courses, or are you going to go read Wikipedia for an hour?
Once upon a time it was worth trying to learn vast amounts of information about a broad range of subjects, just in case you needed it one day. Because when you did eventually need the information, you might not have access to the right book, or you might not have time to read it. These days the problem is just knowing what information to look for in the first place. A different kind of education might be necessary for that, but I don't think we've really figured out what that would look like yet. IMO, what we need is a better system for cross-discipline study. The value of an engineering student reading another engineering textbook has declined -- once he learns enough to identify potential problems and look up the solution with the appropriate jargon, there's not much more than can't be looked up as needed. He doesn't need to memorize equations that he isn't using every day, or even memorize where in the book those equations are. But what about when the biologist discovers a structure that can inspire new architecture? Does the biologist know about the potential engineering applications? Do the engineers know about the new developments in biology? Do they even know the correct jargon to punch into the system in order to find it?Would they even be looking if they did?
We need less focus on learning facts and statistics and more focus on building connections. I don't think traditional education is really designed to provide that. And online lectures even less so.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:13PM (1 child)
These days they do. They charge for it, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @08:51PM
I seem to recall that the charge is actually rather reasonable. (Somewhere in the range of $100 to $300, is what I have in my, perhaps, faulty memory.) A lot cheaper than getting a graduate degree these days. Now, whether your employer will be impressed with this...well, that is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @02:52AM
TFA shows how long Twitter hashtags stay popular, with a decrease from 2013 to 2016. But Twitter has not stayed constant, and the user base doubled in this period. So maybe what's changing is not our "collective attention span", but rather how it is measured.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @05:46AM (8 children)
Here are the pending stories for this site, every single one with the name of a multibillion dollar corporation in the title:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:26AM (7 children)
I guess the band U2 is a multibillion dollar corp...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @07:35AM (6 children)
Lockheed certainly is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @08:17AM (5 children)
Was Lockheed Martin in the title?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @08:25AM (4 children)
No, only realDonaldTrump.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:51AM
Trump is a multib... Aha forget it the Kardashians are on.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 16 2019, @01:43PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @03:05PM (1 child)
The exception proves the rule.
(Score: 1) by Coward, Anonymous on Tuesday April 16 2019, @09:12PM
I like Jeffreys Prior on this one, and you probably get simple things wrong about 20 % of the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:20AM (4 children)
That "summary" is five paragraphs long. tldr I'm waiting for the video.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @10:30AM (3 children)
On the other hand as a "slightly older" person, I prefer summary text to video. Even at 5 paragraphs, I can skim read and be done in well under a minute. With video, not so easy to do.
Video tends to have way too much padding around the interesting material and not so easy to skip past. Text is so much easier to skip back and forth and consume at your own rate, rather than at the rate of the presenter's output.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:40AM (2 children)
Thanks for that grandpa. Apart from boring posts, your generation is also responsible for global warming, genderism and nazis (literally).
(Score: 2, Touché) by r_a_trip on Tuesday April 16 2019, @12:19PM (1 child)
The fun part is that we made the shit, but you get to clean it up :P
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:12PM
Stay polite until you want to figure out how to clean up your own diaper while in your wheelchair ...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Coward, Anonymous on Tuesday April 16 2019, @11:46AM
The Notre Dame fire reminded me of Grenfell Tower in London, so I checked if there were in recent developments (there's not much new). But my point is that the internet allows us to more easily keep track of older stories that are of interest. In some ways, our attention span grows!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:50AM
Meanwhile the Notre Dame stories just keep coming. Where's the 24-hour news cycle when you need it?