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...
Adam Osborne (Year 12) It is without doubt that we are currently experiencing a climate crisis in the form of climate change but what exactly is climate change and what are the ways in which we can slow down the impacts it is causing on Earth. In this essay I will go into what climate change is, the effects of it and certain mitigation measures and adaptation strategies we can undertake to save our planet for our future generations from suffering irreversible damage. Climate change refers to the long-term shifts in the weather patterns and global temperatures. This has been caused both naturally and from humans. The main human activities that have driven climate change include the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. The burning of fossil fuels results in large amounts of carbon dioxide being released which is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases trap heat in our atmosphere which causes global warming which means that temperatures begin to rise. Furthermore, deforestation is a...