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...
[Image credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/written-art-monastery-church-4934081/ ] This essay won the inaugural WBGS Fuller Research Prize Competition in 2021 JOE MCHUGH When was Jesus born? At face value, this question seems like a simple one to answer. The day? the 25 th . The month? December. The year? Well, if the year now is AD 2021, then surely Jesus was born 2021 years ago. So, December 25 th , 2021 years ago, making that the year 0? However, the Anno Domini system of dating years we use in our calendar, the Gregorian calendar, does not include a year 0. Instead, it skips from 1BC to AD 1. The contemporary consensus on Jesus’ birth year is c.4BC. How can someone be born four years before their own birthday? This date bases itself on the historical figure in the Bible, King Herod, the Roman client King of Judea from 36-1BC. 1 In addition to ancient historians, astrological data about the presumed Star of Bethlehem in Mathew 2:1-2 also concludes c.4BC. The lunar occulta...