- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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I can’t speak for other people, but i feel like my attention span is really [for lack of a better term] bipolar. Either ill be able to sit down and read or work on or watch or play something for half a day and not even consider getting up to get water, or I’ll sit down and immediately want to do anything else. Part of it is just how much fun I’m having, of course, but even when I’m working on my physics hw for college I can usually do that without a problem, but other work will make me want to get up instantly, even if it is no where near as complex or demanding
Dunno if this is the same thing as what you’re describing, but makes me think of ADHD hyperfocus (or hyperfixation?) which can also happen with ASD as I understand. But ADHD is more the one where it shows up as a seeming vacillation between hyperfocus and inattentiveness.
Like the right kind of video game and gameplay loop, I could easily fixate on for hours. But if you put something in front of me that my brain (for reasons I don’t have much say in) finds “boring”, I may struggle to stay engaged for five minutes.
Bipolar might be a word to describe mine as well.
The subject is a fair one to investigate. The video itself comes off like one big ad. Vague and noncommittal enough in its investigations to avoid being accused of giving wrong information, while also specific enough to steer the viewer toward the sponsorship. (I’d be more interested in a study on the impact of sponsorships shoved into every faux social connection between viewer and performer.)
I’m also just suspicious of the focus on TikTok. They did use the term short form video some of the time, but in general TikTok has been vilified in association with Cold War style hatred of China, so any time people start separating out TikTok from other social media like it’s distinct gives me pause. It’s like when people say China is going to steal their data, but they leave out the fact that western design has already done so.
That said, I’m sure that the things we do regularly have an impact on us. Question is what is that impact and what is the worldview behind how people feel about the impact. Why is the focus on studying short form video, but not on studying what causes poverty? Might sound unrelated, but one of those has a more obviously damaging impact and we don’t need fuzzy studies to understand that poverty sucks. I think we here know the answer as to why it’s the one and not the other. TikTok has been one way people have gotten info beyond the controls of legacy media and helped them formulate views that make the imperialists sweat. Associating such platforms with harm can potentially scare people away from using them and put them back in the hands of legacy media. It’s one of those things where bias is so important to understand. A study can produce factually accurate information by some metric while being biased on what is being studied. The western media sphere is rife with this kind of faux neutrality. Meanwhile, if we properly study a thing like poverty, it leads us to anti-capitalism.
My suspicion on this subject in general (which needs concrete investigation, but there is some reasoning to it) is that a lot of what this is sort of orbiting around is energy levels and rested vs. not, and the reason the information on it is so vague is because the prevailing status quo has a motive against promoting the value of rest. Even the way things like meditation get framed in the self help, self improvement sphere, is as another tool for optimizing the human experience, human capability, etc. There is something that I recall from before and I don’t know how well studied it is, but it’s called “decision fatigue” and the general idea is that making decisions takes energy, so if you have to do a lot of it, the later decisions in the day will probably become less thoughtful, more “just get this done with.” Swiping is a decision and if you’re doing that a lot, that’s a lot of decisions. So I can see how that could wear a person out as decision-making is concerned and then if they are faced with a question that requires taking a step back and doing deeper analysis, they may feel more wearied about it and appear more impulsive and make more mistakes as a result.
So in the context of short form video, my hypothesis would be that the most distinct to its form kind of factor is quantity of decision-making and the more general factor is one that applies to all of the content-bloated internet, which is that novel input takes energy to process and being able to shove it into your brain constantly could wear you out (but this could also apply to flipping through TV channels too and that’s been around a ways before high speed internet).
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.
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.
Yeah, we need rest, especially from work and trauma. And yeah, the vagueness too makes it less worthy to investigate the content. Don’t waste my time, one might say! But that’s exactly what they do, quite consistently.
Besides, longform content on YouTube that’s each a few hours long wastes your time, profoundly as well as your energy, and executive functioning. And these YouTubers have the guile to lambast TikTok and TikTok influencers, which I find annoying. One day, everyone will have been for short form content…
But frankly, I want a balance; no rambling and meandering videos and no short content that lacks substance.
There is definitely something to be said for the style of video that can get to the point in a few minutes without feeling like it’s rushing through the concepts either. Some concepts may warrant longer amount of time, but I think often with youtube, it’s been padded out because of ad plays giving people a monetary incentive to pad the length of their videos (I remember youtubers talking about this when things were transitioning to the norm being longer videos). Whereas like with tiktok and short form more generally, it’s reversed motive/design; be brief, even if that’s damaging to the content.
Capitalism and its distortion of motives toward monetization over quality of life.
Frankly?
YouTube is worse now; it has indeed gone downhill.
Still has good content here and there but of generally lower quality.
Many videos are one and done now.
I save many of them, but that’s just me; I use Raindrop.io with note-taking but most people won’t and should not be expected to use a note-taking or cloud-saving app.
Besides, even my note-taking reveals that the videos are largely bereft of new info for every 5 minutes of a video.
Even ML YouTubers have this problem, arguably more than most (but the again, so do ultra-right or fascist YouTubers and other political YouTubers so, whatever, might as well be objective here when assessing them).
They can’t explain their point effectively. Not even in a way that’s accurate. Give a YouTuber an hour to explain something and it’s just rambling nonsense. Even 30 minutes is meandering nonsense.
I hate to sound like a conservative here, but I do… kinda blame modern-day culture (not just digital capitalism)… but that in itself is informed by capitalism, of course.
Culture mixed with the modern-day Internet produces bad results.
I miss Internet message boards or Internet forums from the 2000s, tbh, not the more centralized socials nowaday(like Twitter).
I hate to sound like a conservative here, but I do… kinda blame modern-day culture (not just digital capitalism)… but that in itself is informed by capitalism, of course.
Culture mixed with the modern-day Internet produces bad results.
I would venture to say part of what you’re touching on is a result of bougie idealism and imperialism mixed with rabid anti-communism resulting in people generally being lost in this headspace of something like a romanticized and distorted imitation of an ancient Greek philosopher, constructed largely from internet quotes of things they never said, mixed with PT Barnum, some fundie Christian preacher here and there for fire, and a dash of good ole western chauvinism.
Basically, what I’m trying to get at is this thing of people talking in such a way it sounds like they’re saying something as an authority on the subject, but they’re mostly saying nothing and most of it boils down to vibes. I don’t excuse myself from this either. It’s a tendency I more so had as a lib, but something I still struggle to shake in spite of being ML-minded now.
I think it usually comes from a place of good intention, but nevertheless, the end result is a lot of meaningless spew that is not grounded in much of anything.
The funny thing is, from my own experience, when I do investigate and learn well on a given topic, suddenly the need to go into that mode tends to evaporate. Because I can just… plainly say what I know. It’s when I’m too ignorant on a topic but am trying to add something to it anyway that I most tend to slip into that headspace. I kind of miss old internet forums too, but if I’m being real, they had this kind of problem in their own way. Threads with 2 people going back and forth for 30 pages in a way that no one but them can follow. Each stubbornly convinced they’re enmeshed in the argument of the century.
To be honest, sometimes I feel that the capitalist backlash against inattentiveness is basically promoting drudgery (overwork without rest), shame, and basically attacks people for “quiet-quitting.”
Is there a socialist backlash to this?
The capitalist system’s promotion of a culture of obsession with constant productivity, overwork and shaming relaxation or idleness as “laziness” is a big part of why attention spans have deteriorated. We are constantly being told that if we are not always doing something valuable that we are wasting our time. Even leisure time is being judged by how many experiences you make and it becomes a sort of competition to show off for others on social media. This makes people very restless and anxious and unable to just sit calmly and quietly for extended periods of time without constantly worrying about how they could or should be doing something “productive”. The fact that there is also a constant financial pressure put on people to constantly have to hustle and make money in some way in order to just survive only compounds on this.
Kill the manager in your head.
everybody needs to read In Praise of Idleness in my opinion https://files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand Russell - In Praise of Idleness.pdf
…Okay, that’s a surprisingly good phrase. Right now, my manager lives rent free. I should make them pay rent, at least.
Yeah, you leave work, but in a way, work follows you.
Work doesn’t always stay at work and then there’s the lingering trauma from said work.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
