Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
MAGADEV ADAM KUHA KUMARAN L6F When you think of Sri Lanka, you may think of a tropical paradise. A pearl in the Indian Ocean, lined with glimmering beaches and a diverse range of religions, culture and language. However, many people do not realise the dark tragedy that occurred on the island, the pain and suffering hiding under the facade of a paradise. This war is virtually unheard of in the Western world, considering the ongoing ethnic discrimination of Sri Lanka’s minorities (especially Tamils and Muslims). Persecution of Tamil Hindus occurs today to an extent. However, the perceived enemy has shifted toward the Muslim, mostly ethnically Tamil, community, particularly since the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019, which shook the world.