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...
RAHUL MEHAN Doping by athletes is pretty scandalous. Doping is defined as ‘administering drugs to an athlete in order to inhibit or enhance sporting performance’. At times it's difficult to believe that some athletes, including many of our idols, make the decision to use performance-enhancing drugs. Athletes dope for a number of reasons such as wanting to win badly for money or for their country. Nonetheless it is still cheating and it creates an unfair advantage. It also creates a bad reputation for the sport and can tarnish the name of the athlete for decades to come. Shane Warne, Lance Armstrong, Ben Johnson, Diego Maradona, Maria Sharapova. Recognise the names? They are all champions, leaders, legends - and cheaters! These athletes, who have been caught by doping officials, have won many prestigious awards. For example Maria Sharapova has won an incredible 5 Grand Slam titles, one at Wimbledon in 2004, one at the US Open in 2006, one in 2008 at the Australian Open and two at t...