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...
Remembering the Holocaust: Why History Must Never Be Forgotten LOUIS OCQUIDANT L6 "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This famous quote from Spanish philosopher George Santayana is one we have heard so many times that we ironically wish we could forget it. And yet we don’t in many academic circles: philosophy, theology, sociology, psychology, and history; we simply repeat it, fulfilling its prophecy. The event that is synonymous with this statement is the Holocaust, the mass industrialized eradication of 6 million Jewish men, women, and children at the hands of Nazi Germany and their collaborators. Pried from their homes. Kept as animals. Dying as people. In March I had the privilege of participating in the Lessons From Auschwitz project, an educational experience organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET). As the name suggests, this project centred around the extermination and labour camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, modern-day Oświęcim, Po...