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...
Rupert's Article won the WBGS Witold Pilecki History Essay competition in the KS3 category, in response to the question “‘ Victory in war always goes to the side with the better leadership.’ To what extent do you agree with this claim? ” RUPERT ZABIHI The great military strategist Sun Tzu stated that the art of war is “governed by five constant factors to be taken into account ” , with ‘The Commander’ as one of these points to consider. This view is believed to have emerged between 475 and 221 B.C. - a time known as the Warring States period, an epoch where heavy conflict was witnessed between states that would later form China. Still, to this day, the quality of leadership of any side has had the capability to bolster a side’s chances of winning, proving the significance of a fine leader and proving Sun Tzu’s statement to be correct. However, it has only ever served as an advantage: not a means of definite success. This essay will argue three notions supporting th...