Social Media Attention Span (Original Post 2)

A Google search of Social Media and Attention Span generates  numerous academic studies, newspaper articles and casual posts concerned with social media users and a perceived diminishing ability to focus on complex or moderately complex subjects for extended periods. 

Judy Ordioni in Social Media and Short Attention Spans provides tedencies in the new media which may be driving this asserted diminished capacity.

• Twitter has a 140 character limit

• Vine is an app for sharing 6 second videos

• Facebook posts of 70 characters or less get the most likes; the number drops when the post is 140 characters or more

• Pinterest, Instagram and Flicker virtually do away with words

• 29% of the most popular Youtube videos are 1 minute or less

One repeated theme from these posts is that a fundamental change is taking place in human cognition producing negative results. Brevity is replacing thoughfullness creating a shallow social media population.

Nicholas Carr in Is Google making us stupid extends the subject and suggests that Google in particular and social media generally are "remapping the neural circuity" of our brains and "chipping away at (our) capacity for concentration and contemplation." Carr suggests that the issues with social media communication go far beyond brief tweets and short videos. He states that the Internet is "subsuming our intellect." He asserts that he has "lost the ability" to sit down and read War and Peace. He fears that Google is striving to create an all consuming Artificial Intelligence which will think for us  like the computer named HAL in the Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey. 

I'd like to offer a contrary view and make some observations.

The Social Media Attention Span postings also exhibit tendencies.

• They tend to be alarmist warning us to take action now or dire consequences will follow. Our children will be unalterably transformed.

• They tend to have a linear view of social media communication evolution pointing in a negative direction.

• They undervalue positive aspects of social media communication.

• They generally exhibit a resistance to change.

While I agree that Social Media communication is fundementally different than speech, writing, reading, radio or video I think the basic negative evolutionary shift  posited is premature. The introduction of  new communication technologies are invariably accompanied by dire predictions of negative consequences that never turn out quite as bad as originally thought.

• Oral cultures viewed speech with suspicion. Athens ostracized the sophists. 

• As Carr (and many others) point out; Socrates bemoaned the invention of writing fearing that people "would cease to use their memory and become forgetful." 

• Vinyl records, eight tracks and cassettes have been burned by preachers and excoriated by educators due to perceived power over teenagers.

• James Joyce's Ulysses was originally banned in the US due to fear of it's alleged corrupting influence. The book was eventually named the best novel of the tentieth century.  

• Television has been blamed for dumming down it's audience by broadcasting reality shows.

Social media and internet communications will continue to evolve and modes of understanding will change. This has been going on for millenium. In this isolated case  the venerable Socrates is not close to the truth. Instead, Heraclitus was closer. Briefly, Heraclitus insisted that change is constant. He famously said that " No man ever steps in the same river twice." Humans, rivers change and people adjust.  Change is predictable as is resistance to change .