So a view I see a lot nowadays is that attention spans are getting shorter, especially when it comes to younger generations. And the growing success of short form content on Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter for example seems to support this claim. I have a friend in their early 20s who regularly checks their phone (sometimes scrolling Tiktok content) as we’re watching a film. And an older colleague recently was pleased to see me reading a book, because he felt that anyone my age and younger was less likely to want to invest the time in reading.
But is this actually true on the whole? Does social media like Tiktok really mould our interests and alter our attention? In some respects I can see how it could change our expectations. If we’ve come to expect a webpage to load in seconds, it can be frustrating when we have to wait minutes. But to someone that was raised with dial-up, perhaps that wouldn’t be as much of an issue. In the same way, if a piece of media doesn’t capture someone in the first few minutes they may be more inclined to lose focus because they’re so used to quick dopamine hits from short form content. Alternatively, maybe this whole argument is just a ‘kids these days’ fallacy. Obviously there are plenty of young adults that buck this trend.
Not language; the presentation of language. For example the internet alone has changed access, distribution, syndication, formatting, referencing, and even competition among sources.
It also used to be a serious chore just to get a copy of a study, now I have millions available with almost no time or effort separating me from them. I have ways to parse and filter them, and other methods of getting the desired information in front of my eyes almost immediately - even if I don’t know the specific study that I am looking for. This means I have exponentially more time for processing content, or doing whatever else I would like to do with my time.
Additionally formatting has changed significantly during this time. Works used to be presented more as singular objects rife with quotes from references. Now articles are modular - they are presented as a single element in a stream, and external references are simply linked. And the text itself has changed due to SEO motivations, which prioritizes understandability (although recently Google has been pushing for long-form content, I find this mostly prioritizes auto-generated spam and endless autobiographies attached to brief recipes).
Certainly, I still have the option to read long-winded essays, and they are still written. And yes, language has changed in this time. But at nowhere near the same pace or effect as the changes in technology and culture over the same time period.