Your thoughts?

I feel like my attention is bad now compared to where it was… or is possibly still getting worse… Honestly, what a bother… I deal with a lot, C-PTSD and ADHD, both of which hurt my attention. The attention economy compounds it further. Now I am less mentally than I could be or so it seems.

What do you think? Video is 25 minutes long so not too long, imho.

  • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    4·
    13 hours ago

    I think it should be short videos that should be focus, not just tiktok. Videos have become extremely easy to make and distribute since tiktok became a thing. The apps themselves not contain capable video editing suites. Not to mention the advances in internet, codecs, playback, AI captioning and so on. Short videos are extremely simulating. They are short so you don’t have to pay attention for long. They get to the point from the very first frame so there is no delay in gratification. They become even more stimulating when there are more things on screen, like the creator talking or the weird eye catching appearing-as-they-speak subtitles that these videos have. I don’t watch this stuff but so I’m making all this up but I feel if one gets accustomed to this level of stimulation the digital crack of yesteryears like an Instagram post with only pictures will feel less interesting. It’s no accident that the ghouls at Google and meta had to copy this format. Even outside tiktok-verse short videos are often sprinkled across facebook and twitter timelines.

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
      4·
      5 hours ago

      I feel if one gets accustomed to this level of stimulation the digital crack of yesteryears like an Instagram post with only pictures will feel less interesting.

      I do think there’s something to the idea of constant novel stimulation messing with people, in a way similar to how drugs can work (but without the physical dependency).

      There’s a whole website, in fact, called “yourbrainonporn” that semi-scientifically is about this kind of thing as it relates to high speed internet and porn (I have not kept up with it, so I don’t know what it’s like now). As I remember, some of it was anecdote, some of it referencing scientific concepts, so I’d take it with a grain of salt. But point is, it was touching on the nature of high speed endless novelty. The whole thing of being able to go “next” when the current thing is not exactly stimulating in exactly the way you want and immediately get a next thing that might be just a little bit closer… it’s sus as brain health goes, I’ll put it that way, considering how similar it seems to be to chasing a high. Though in this regard, it may be that short form video is an intensified version of what was already being observed with high speed internet more generally.