DISQUS

Rob Hyndman · 3 years ago

Assuming this is is true, and not just a justification for an ADD-afflicted generation, I'm not sure it's a good thing.

First, I'm pretty sure it's not a good thing that we are getting even more media-obsessed as a society, unless our ultimate goal is to set new world records for sofa ass-marks. I have a Treo specifically to avoid push email. My choices are my own. I believe in pull. I don't really want anything pushed at me - partly because I want to control how I spend my attention, and partly because I want the privacy.

But perhaps more importantly, I'm pretty sure that not many good things have come from short attention spans. It's kind of a charming thing to say about yourself, in a kind of self-regarding trust-fund-kid kind of way, but try to build a bridge, or a company, or a relationship, with a short-attention span. It's of a piece with the myth of multi-tasking, something I write about often, and it strikes me as a liberal, twenty-something conceit, more than a carefully formed view of the way the world really works. At least I hope so.

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

Thanks for the comment, Rob. I share many your concerns -- about the things you mentioned, and about the "echo chamber" effect and so on. But I don't think that the idea of new media as being equivalent to attention necessarily means short attention. To use the Observer as just one example, I've read pieces there that were thousands of words long (but then maybe I'm not typical). And the part about media "finding you" wasn't so much about push content as it was about the ability to select the things you want to watch or read or listen to, and do it when you want, instead of when the network or the newspaper wants -- in other words, RSS and podcasts and PVRs and location-free media and so on.

Rob Hyndman · 3 years ago

I was actually riffing off of Kushner's assertion that his generation has shorter attention spans. Though I suspect that if the Huffington Post and blogs are the future, the days of the essay may well be numbered. I hope not.

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

Good point -- he did say that. I think I'm suffering from short-attention-span syndrome too :-)