our speed of life is dangerous.

One of the most pressing issues in our times is how we deal with social media's influence on our brains. Now I’m not going to press on in this article with scientific evidence based upon miles of peer reviewed documents by well known and/or well respected psychologists and scientists, but what I am going to attempt to write about is how I see the future of our mental health and mental capabilities expanding or shrinking based upon how we interact with technology in the coming millennia. 

Creating a system predicated on holding our attention for a long period of time seems to be the chase of all entertainment. It seems to be the movement that triggers why some piece of content is made. In film we are constantly reminded of this idea, big blockbusters are built upon the idea of keeping your attention for a long time. But I ask you this question earnestly, is that why we watch films? To have our attention captured for 2 hours, 3 hours, even 4 hours in some cases? I think possibly that question dodges the real issue here, which is that the inherent guidestone of culture that our current society is built upon is taken aback by the simplicity at which our attention now is captured. Long films are made to be long films because directors have more creative freedom. They are able to tell a story that’s meant to be long, because film isn’t trying to capture our attention anymore. It knows it’s lost that battle; it lost that battle whenever social media first came into frame. Instead, film is now predicated on telling stories. And in the past I understand the idea that film was based upon the foundation of story, but before the last 10 years, and in the years after the Golden Age of Hollywood, it seems as if big blockbuster films, big money grabbing and social class glue that brought most people together, was meant to capture the attention, and to never let it go. In the years before this happened, in my estimation at least, there was a purpose to certain larger budget films. They were meant to tell stories that didn’t have to capture your attention and evade the present authorities. Rather, it was predicated on simply, telling a story. I do think my statements in this past paragraph gloss over fantastic stories that happened during this time, but the overarching point I’m attempting to make is one of a volatile and an incessant plea to understand the simple idea, that entertainment is meant to capture our attention, and evade the present authorities. 

Social media, or at least most social platforms are built around the idea of capturing your attention for long periods of time. Keeping you locked onto their app or website is the most important aspect of their business model. If they can keep you engaged they make money, and they make you feel as if you have done something by watching something they provided. I make the point that social media is built around the idea of capturing your attention for long periods of time just so I can make the comparison between the goals of film and social platforms. They want your attention. The base belief behind how they accomplish that is very similar. Film tells stories to keep you engaged; social media gives you stories to keep you engaged. The comparison ends there though. Because as film attempts to keep you engaged by telling you something thoughtful and something meant to provoke you in some manner, social media knows that if it shortens your attention to just a few seconds, it can keep your undivided overall attention for hours on end. 

There’s this idea passed around that our attention spans have been shortening for the past 20 years or so, and one driving thought process is that an influx of content has caused this. While I understand that there is conjecture in this theory, it would do us good to not dismiss it as nothing more than a footnote, but rather interpret it as something we should be afraid of. I’m not going to say the death of attention is the death of mankind, but it very much could be. 

In creating a false sense of what attention is supposed to feel like in our own mind, we have caused a split, or factional divide between what drives entertainment and attention and the inherent culpability of what real life is supposed to feel like. Real life is meant to be slow. I don’t mean slow as in this picture - a small town with a few hundred people who all know each other, half of which go to one church, ⅛ of which go to another, and the rest filter in between. The closest city is 30 miles away, and they happen to have a small town grocery story that tells the story of a past time built on lost time. - No, I mean slowed time as in our attention spans. In a conversation I had recently I discovered this sense of attention seeking. Not for someone to notice me, but rather for the noticement of my own brain to spark something. I wanted to be occupied by something I found interesting. At that moment it was this person I was talking to. But looking back, perhaps my mind was split into viewing what I wanted to see and what my brain was looking at. I don’t know if that makes perfect sense, and I’d be happy to try to explain that phrasing in further detail if you just shoot over an email. But, in viewing that moment at which my attention was divided between something I wanted to see, or hear, and something I was actually looking at is quite remarkable to me. My mind was a scatterplot full of dots that have no correlation to each other. Full of marks and labels that hold no bearing on my actual decisions. Perhaps our attention now is under attack by the very thing attacking us, a false reality based around a false dichotomy. 

The period at which our attention spans have broken seems to be the point at which our value to ourselves comes under attack. Whenever the lightbulb of thought pops into our brains, we are overwhelmed by the idea that someone else already turned that light on in their own brain. Or when you wake up and feel as if nothing is worth doing because it has already been done. I think this idea of never feeling good enough, a feeling that has created a cloud of dust around my generation and the generation that follows, is one that creeps up onto us. We don’t see it coming. We see the dust in the future, yet it seems to be still, frozen, locked in place,  until we run into it, or perhaps a more apt description would be that it collides into us, and then it envelops everything we think about. In my estimation of time gone by, past generations didn’t have to deal with the situation of creating a separate life. A life curated, a life meant to be everything you want your life to be. And in creating this “other self” per-say, we have sentenced our attention and our mental health to a place situated between money and power and knowledge. 

The sentencing is simple. If past generations had the speed of knowledge capture that we have now, I think they would have dealt with the same issues. One of the biggest problems I see now is how fast it takes to understand, or at least learn about something just 30 years ago we would have had to research in a book, for days on end. Now we can watch a youtube video, or read an article for 30 minutes and have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics. Perhaps that's the biggest issue here. How do we capture knowledge in a healthy manner? How can we use the speed at which knowledge and thought is distributed to grab hold of the terrible nature of attention today? I’m not going to try to solve any of the issues I’ve brought up in this thought experiment, but what I will do is end on some thoughts on the state of attention.

Is attention now simply monetary?

Are our attention spans a symptom of a larger issue societally, or just something that occurs naturally as society grows?

And finally, did this article keep you engaged? Was it as entertaining as a reel or tik tok or youtube video? Probably not, and maybe that’s just a problem we will have to live with. Or maybe, write a bit more about.