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October 5, 2006
View Comments | Post CommentI Don't Have A Short Atten--Hey, Check Out This Website!
Jeanette parrots, in an aside to a post with which I generally agree, an oft-rendered complaint about our generation's attachment to the internet:
"...our attention spans have so decreased because of the instantly-gratifying and world-at-our-fingertips nature of modern technology that even if we haven't forgotten about these other entertainment media, we often cannot properly enjoy them because we cannot give them the patience and concentration they require..."
I have a very different take on this issue. I don't think the internet has limited our attention spans at all. I agree that we are now less fulfilled by traditional media, but I think the explanation lies in the natures of traditional media. Traditional media are essentially "lecture media." They are one-way processes where consumers sit back while content-providers do their best to entertain them, by pushing content to the consumers. New media, on the other hand, are increasingly participatory. It goes way beyond the 1990s buzzword-aspiration of "interactivity," though that alone is a large reason why new media is gaining importance over traditional media. In new media, for instance, so-called Web 2.0 technologies, the interactivity is the medium. In these technologies, either the interactions are the medium directly (MySpace, Facebook, Dodgeball), or users create the media themselves (Flickr, Blogspot, Wikipedia), or the content is meta-media (Digg, Del.icio.us, Last FM, Pandora), or it's some hybrid where the content is user-supplied, but not user-created, and the users are making recommendations by the act of supplying the content (YouTube). Those categories are arbitrary, but the point is that new media gives the user more control.
The other aspect of new media is that, because the users are providing the content, niche markets are better served. When it doesn't cost the content provider any money to supply niche content, more (eventually all) niches are covered. For example, it isn't worthwhile for a company to start a television channel devoted entirely to discussion of elliptic curve cryptography. On the other hand, I am positive that discussions of elliptic curve cryptography abound on the web. In other words (and Derek will be so proud of me for this), new media solves the problem of The Long Tail. Even relatively obscure subjects can get lots of coverage when content providers don't have to fund that coverage (except for an extremely small marginal cost, i.e. GoogleGroups has to provide another MB of storage capacity). In other words, users can be entertained by entertainment tailored to their specific, idiosyncratic, and even unpopular interests.
The point of all this is that we don't have shorter attention spans--if that were true, how could we spend hours on a single web site? We just have a higher standard for how much our entertainment must implicate our interests, and we demand to be involved in the process of our own entertainment. We aren't content to sit back and be entertained. We need entertainment that pulls us in and makes us participate. So don't denigrate our generation just because we have higher standards.
Posted at October 5, 2006 4:54 PM | Comments (4)
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Interesting take.
Me personally....I'm a passionate devotee of movies because I'm in love with the sensation of being absorbed in another world. I like it when the lights go down, I sit back, and some director takes me on a ride through his or her vision. I forget the world around me....or I participate in this new world with some dear friends.......and become surrounded by the new world created around me.
That would seem to be the very definition of the passivity you so despise. Is that a lower standard?
Posted by: Ben at October 5, 2006 9:12 PM
Despite the new paradigms emerging, we can still find pleasure in the old media. I still pick up a paper most days, occasionally watch television, and you know I watch a ton of movies and listen to a ton of music. But I think that those media occupy a lesser role in our [generation's] lives and our [generation's] entertainment now than they did, say, twenty years ago. Well crafted entertainment in any paradigm can still be enjoyed.
Posted by: David Barzelay at October 5, 2006 10:48 PM
On a related note, you would almost certainly enjoy
Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Pop Culture is Actually Making us Smarter
by Steven Johnson
It is great and runs along the same lines as your blog.
Posted by: Lauren at October 11, 2006 12:45 PM
genius
Posted by: amanda at October 14, 2006 11:57 PM
