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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: 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.