The Shallow Culture of Busy Lives
- It has become pointless to circulate a lengthy deep analysis: most people will ignore it.
- The only piece of communication that is certain to receive broad attention is a short message (whether text or video).
- If reading an article takes too long, most people will just ignore it, no matter how interested they are in the topic.
- This trend preexisted the social media, and, in fact, the social media that have been more successful are the ones that, involuntarily, fit with that trend.
- The decline in readership for newspapers and magazines is the consequence of this shorter attention span.
- The cause is the increasingly busy and organized lives of ordinary people.
- This, ultimately, has to do with how we allocate time in our lives, and the truth is that most people are not willing to allocate time for "continuing education" next to their work/study, exercise, shopping and social events, even when they retain the right to have strong opinions.
- Important topics need to be trivialized in order to have broad diffusion.
- The result is inevitably a trend towards a more and more shallow culture created by increasingly superficial analyses, the only ones that obtain broad circulation.
- People's attention span is becoming so short that it will soon be impossible to explain the consequences of a short attention span
- The same trend translated into the physical life yields more superficial friendships and community relations.
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