why does everyone have the attention span of a goldfish?
plus, wikipedia astrology!
last week as i was scrolling through tiktok, i noticed something that irked me to no end. every video that was educational or explaining a concept had comments about the video (usually only three minutes) being too long, the explanation being too long-winded, and criticizing the creator for not getting to the point fast enough.
forgive me if i sound like a boomer, but it’s infuriating to see so many people be this upset about three minute videos. it’s three minutes of your life, you can’t listen to someone explain a concept in conversational english?
the picture above is two comments that were on a video explaining the importance of ingredients that block different UV types instead of just relying on an SPF number. i found it helpful and informative, but many people thought otherwise.
another example i’ll show you are two comments on a two-minute video explaining the concept of “felt sense,” which is a hard psychology concept to explain to people who don’t have it.
the creator started off the video explaining that studies found that a reliable indicator of how well a person will implement changes in their life based on therapy is a specific trait. they were explaining this as context for the reason why this trait is important to know about, and then get into explaining the concept of felt sense. clearly, it’s criminal to not say that at the very beginning.
the concept of felt sense is obviously difficult to explain, because it’s an innate thing to those who have it. it’s like explaining the colour orange to someone who has never seen it before without using objects as an example.
comments like these are on a lot of educational or explainer videos, and i’m personally noticing it more and more. many people are becoming unable to pay attention to people explaining things, and just seem to have no real interest in learning, despite the fact that they’re watching the video and leaving a snarky comment.
another phenomenon that kind of shattered my soul were the videos of the game subway surfers with an audio of a storytime, or a split screen of the subway surfers video with a clip of a tv show or other video (often family guy clips). the point of the subway surfers footage is to give people something else to focus on, since watching the game sort of feels like going into a trance sometimes. sometimes instead of subway surfers, or alongside it, is another video of kinetic sand or some other tactile and satisfying looking thing in the visual ASMR universe.
this soon became a joke, with tiktokers making videos of talking to someone while showing them a phone screen with a video of subway surfers so the person they’re talking to can hear them. but because i’m a person who hates fun, it really bugged me that this is a thing people sometimes genuinely rely on to be able to pay attention.
this all ties into something that happened on twitter a few weeks ago, where youtuber and now podcaster mina le announced that she would be releasing a podcast on topics supplementary to her videos. since she already makes video content and that takes massive amounts of editing and getting visually ready, she said the podcast would not have a video component. this clearly upset some people, with some claiming that issues like ADHD and sensory processing disorder would make it impossible to listen to the podcast without a visual aspect. i would link to the tweets or post a screenshot, but mina le has made her twitter private and deleted her posts (not entirely sure why). obviously some media will be inherently inaccessible in certain ways, like shows without described video for blind people or movies without subtitles. i’m sure that most content creators would like everything they make to be fully accessible, but it’s not always realistic to cover everyone’s accommodations if you’re making content for thousands.
with all of this being said, i can’t help but feel like the world we currently live in is killing our attention spans. i know attention span problems existed before the internet, but it seems much more pervasive now than before. having content thrown at us at a million miles per hour in bite-sized pieces must be doing something negative to our brains. we’re indundated with information by default.
i hope that these issues don’t get worse, but i can’t help but feel pessimistic about it for now. if you had enough focus to make it this far, keep it up, and if you skipped to the end, please go outside and look at a tree for a while.
track of the week
i’ve been doing my annual rewatch of daria and laughed so hard listening to this song. i would listen to this daily if it were a real song. anyway go watch daria if you haven’t yet.
the signs as wikipedia articles i found when pressing the random article button
aries - Music and political warfare
taurus - Villa Medici at Cafaggiolo
gemini - The Bet (1997 film)
cancer - Orchis pallens
leo - Royal Panopticon of Science And Art
virgo - EMC 1800 hp B-B
libra - Chione (daughter of Boreas)
scorpio - Postumus
sagittarius - Welcome Creek Wilderness
capricorn - The Desperate Hours (1955 film)
aquarius - Timeline of the introduction of television in countries
pisces - Metallic bonding