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...
By Karam Chaggar, (L6T) In recent times, there has been an exacerbation in anti Tik-Tok zeal - the criticism of the platform outlined by policy makers is primarily one concerned with ‘national security’, insisting that Tik Tok excessive access to user’s data can lend itself to Beijing’s aim of world domination. Whilst there is little doubt to be cast over the invasive data harvesting deployed by the Chinese social media giant, the more worrying impact of Tik Tok is identifiable in what it has done to our attention spans - the persistent, endless stream of immediate gratification is eroding our brains. And this epidemic of non stop satisfaction has infected our political and economic landscape - take the revolving door of 10 Downing Street, or COVID hysteria. The scourge of short termism is not a modern episode - as we will explore, the lack of a palpable project to steer our nation has culminated in what we see now: an economy projected to perform worse than Russia’s. The unrave...