Hello and welcome to The Looking Glass, WBGS' very own Academic Blog. This year we are planning to breathe new life into this amazing blog as the Academic Head Boy team for 2025- 2026! However, at the Looking Glass we need your help to catapult this blog into it's GOLDEN AGE. We need your articles, your essays, your opinions and your finest work to MAKE THE LOOKING GLASS GREAT AGAIN! If you have read something interesting or watched something that sparked a thought on social media - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you entered a competition, however big or small - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you are interested in a specific field, issue or period - WRITE ABOUT IT! If you have produced artwork, a piece of music or creative writing - WE WILL PUBLISH IT! Your creative skills have been called to action - now we must muster to create, discover and explore. You are the creative minds of the future. The Plato's, the Newtons, the Angelo's, the Nietzsche's. This is your calling. This is Y...
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...