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...
Arjun Dhillon (U6G) What is Devolution?: Devolution is the delegation of power from the UK parliament in Westminster to assemblies in Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland. In 1997 the Labour Party held a referendum in Scotland & Wales over devolution and 74% of Scottish voters and 50% of Welsh voters voted in favour of devolution. By 1998 the Good Friday Agreement had led to a ceasefire and paved the way for a Northern Ireland Assembly too. In the Scottish Parliament, there are 129 members and it is currently led by Humza Yousaf. It uses the AMS voting system and has key powers, particularly in Policing, Transport, Health, and Education. In the Welsh Senedd, there are 60 members; it is currently led by Vaughan Gething. It uses the AMS voting system and has key powers, particularly in the Fire & Rescue services, Transport, Agriculture, and the Environment. In the Northern Ireland Assembly, there were 90 members; it is currently vacant. It used the STV vo...