Technology

This article is BS. Here are some quotes:

What is doomscrolling if not avid reading? If people are failing to focus in some places, they’re clearly succeeding in others.

This is like saying channel surfing (flipping through Netflix or whatever videos but never picking one) is focus.

It continues:

One place they’re succeeding is cinema, which is in a baroque phase. A leading Golden Globe winner this year, “The Brutalist,” exceeds three and a half hours... Hollywood’s reliance on sequels and recycled intellectual property—we’re a hair’s breadth from a crossover in which Thor fights the Little Mermaid—may have been terrible for cinema. It has, however, made for complicated movies tightly packed with backstory and fan service.

Something being long doesn't indicate focus. I haven't seen The Brutalist, so I'll use other long movies as an example: Avatar, King Kong, and The Hobbit series. What do those have in common? It's not deep plot or complex character arcs, but action sequences. In other words, you could space out for 30 min and not miss anything.

Shorter movies require more attention and focus because they move faster, so you can't miss even 10 min (or even 5) or you'll have trouble keeping up.

As writers stopped worrying about viewers losing the thread, their shows started resembling ultra-long films. Viewers responded by binge-watching, taking in hours of material in what Vince Gilligan, who created “Breaking Bad,” has called “a giant inhalation.”

Newer shows are way less dense than they used to be. I just binged The Queen's Gambit and literally fell asleep for an entire episode and didn't feel like I missed anything. That show would've been much more interesting as a feature length film instead of a mini-series.

Or consider video games, which have grown mercilessly long.

Not because of content that requires focus, but collecting random stuff. There's actually less story and problem solving in many of these longer games than older point and click games had, and those weren't known for complexity...

But deep dives into niche topics have become the norm. The wildly popular podcaster Joe Rogan runs marathon interviews, some exceeding four hours, on ancient civilizations, cosmology, and mixed martial arts. A four-hour video of the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson dissecting the design flaws of a defunct Disney World hotel has eleven million views (deservedly: it’s terrific). Hayes himself confesses to spending hours “utterly transfixed” by watching old carpets being shampooed.

Something being long doesn't mean it requires focus.

In fact, the opposite is true. My most difficult textbook in college was something like 100-150 pages, and it took us the entire class to finish. What made it difficult was a complete lack of hand-holding, and it's perhaps my favorite pig of all the textbooks I had, and the only one I read cover to cover. It's something I can reference, so it's still useful years after mastering the material, but getting through it took an immense amount of focus.

Above all, they demand patience, the inclination to stick with things that aren’t immediately compelling or comprehensible. Patience is indeed a virtue, but a whiff of narcissism arises when commentators extoll it in others, like a husband praising an adoring wife. It places the responsibility for communication on listeners, giving speakers license to be overlong, unclear, or self-indulgent. When someone calls for audiences to be more patient, I instinctively think, Alternatively, you could be less boring.

This isn't narcissism, it's the definition of focus. It's about using your mental faculties to extract information, and it requires a lot of effort and patience. Watching a movie for a long time doesn't. If I want to learn something, I'd rather struggle for a few hours with an information dense text than watch a dozen hours of YouTube hand holding, and I'll get much more from the text than the video series.

Given this statement and the sheer length of and lack of information in the article, I think the author has a focus problem.

To ascribe our woes to a society-wide attention-deficit disorder is to make the wrong diagnosis.

Which is unfortunate, because our relationships to our smartphones are far from healthy.

Seems like the author rebutted his own argument, but fails to acknowledge it.