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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: 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