The person who said that complaints of "everyone has short attention spans now" are mostly just ways to complain that the public doesn't like something you like/made really hit the nail on the head. We've been seeing accusations that every kind of media has been "causing short attention spans" going back over a century at this point. Recorded music, specific genres of music, movies, the radio, pulp literature, comic books, tv, video games, every different kind of computer. And there's never been any kind of real effect observed in scientific research to back this up, just very small studies showing results that vanish in larger studies.
It's all about people trying to find a big-if-true harm that they can blame their own unpopularity or the unpopularity of the things they like on, rather than being real. Especially among kids, where scientific research is pretty conclusive on "it's normal that kids have low attention spans" just like it's normal they have a hard time with really steady fine motor control or dealing with emotions compared to adults.
Yeah you're replicating precisely the common and baseless assertion of declining attention I mentioned! I guarantee you though, ever since TV broadcasting of movies became a thing in the 30s and then home video availability of movies in the 70s, you've had tons of people multitasking in front of movies.
There was no "going from reading books to reading articles to reading tweets to tiktok". People watching tiktok or youtube for that matter, are almost entirely replacing traditional TV and related visual media. People reading articles in a newspaper or magazine before the internet are extremely likely to have replaced that with simply reading articles online, in any of a wide variety of formats. People who listened to books on tape now listen to books on digital files; people who read in print now read more digitally. And of course a lot of the formats you had to use in the past to access the sort of writing you wanted have changed.
As for hard statistics, according to an early 2022 Pew Research report, between 2011 and 2021 the percent of American adults who claim to have read a book in any format (print, digital, audio) went from 78% in 2011 to lows of 72% in 2015 and 2019, and back up to 75% as of 2021 (years 2013, 2017, 2020 did not have data for this). Not a huge change at all, and frankly a lot of the people involved in the changes were probably the most marginal readers, those who only read a single book in the years they did read. Among the demographic breakdowns for 2021, there was a consistent decline in amount saying they'd read books from youngest to oldest - 83% of 18-29s read compared to 68% for 65+ (particularly telling because the youngest groups use sites like tiktok the most!).
To go back further in time though, data on reading is somewhat sparse! Gallup in 2005 reported that in 2005 83% of adult Americans read at least one book a year, in 2003 81% had, in 1999 84% had, that in 1990 81% did, and that in 1978 88% did. Frankly this would imply the majority of the decline from 1978 to 2021 took place before the cold war ended, especially since the stated margin of error on both the Gallup and Pew data was ±3% - which means the variance from 2011-2021 could be entirely statistical noise - and the same for the apparent changes recorded between 1990 and 2005.
We should also keep in mind how broad a category a "book" even is. Reading a 32 page instructional book, a 60 page novella, a 500 page textbook, or a 1200 page monstrosity of a high fantasy novel would all be "a book". And we don't have very good stats for how those sorts of things have changed in people's book consumption over time other than rather slim informational volumes tending to be perfectly replaceable by reading a couple of articles online, or a novella being as likely these days to show up for free in a larger online site as it is to get sold separately.
And that should really go into the fact we tend to underestimate how much reading we do just browsing the internet, even when your main activity is looking at videos. You read a bunch of tweets, it doesn't feel it's adding up to a lot of reading perhaps, but you might well be exceeding how you used to skim the newspaper decades ago. Let alone when you're reading a couple articles or chatting with friends (text-based chatting being something that literate people did a lot of via mail long ago, which faded through much of the late 20th century as live phone calls got popular, and has resurged tremendously with the internet and widely available cell phones).
Though it's very funny to bring up singles in music as a "new" thing - you know that's really the only thing you could do for music for many many decades of recorded music right? That even by my grandfather's youth, a music album was still literally placing several singles into a binder for ease of storage and sale when a particular artist was selling very well or a record label had a good idea for a themed collection of various artists? And once you could really get an album on a single long-playing disc, you still had massive sales of singles all the way through to the late 90s even as formats changed. The only time singles weren't particularly popular in sales was roughly 97/98 to 2003, when their sales utterly collapsed in the face of album sales until digital storefronts revitalized singles sales and with the far lower prices of digital singles it was a no-brainer to spend on that. (And of course classic radio and modern radio in the form of streaming has always loved the single more than the album!)
But anyway to answer the last question you posed here, I'm reading much more books in 2022 versus 2012 or 2013 - as I've switched from still trying to pick up physical copies to leaning even more heavily on my ereader, there's simply a lot more for me to read! Heck, even just the difference from having to make a trip out to the library versus the library having e-lending for most titles, or just downloading versus waiting for amazon to ship or taking time out of the day to hit up a bookstore.
I think the assertion is not that folks no longer read books -- it's what percentage of media consumption comes from long-form content. 18-29 year olds have a higher percentage of reading books makes a lot of sense, given that's the age demographic of college and grad students. what is perhaps jarring is seeing this explosion of short-form content in the past decade+ (twitter, vine) and how tied it is to advertising (and music licensing) revenue, this incentivizing creators to game the system. we're so used to scrolling and swiping through content we do it while watching movies or during our workdays.
I actually also eat the biodegradeable packing peanuts. Not like, a lot, and mostly I do it as a prank to try to convince someone that I'm eating the styrofoam ones, but they do have a satisfying way of dissolving in your mouth. Stop looking at me like that, I swear I'm not crazy!
Wow. So much yes! That reference to TikTok and the music industry is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Plus those videos stitched together - I'd never thought about it being content creators getting lazy... but I think that could well be the case.
I think what made the whole Velma controversy make sense to me was the stark divide between millennials and gen z on Scooby Doo. To anyone around my age who was watching kids' TV in the 90s, Scooby Doo was just an old show that was on a lot. I can't imagine many people passionately caring about the sanctity of that show. But since the 2000s, Warner Bros has been regularly producing new Scooby Doo shows that apparently put more emphasis on character. So gen z are coming at it from the view that you can't alter the sanctity of these meaningful characters, whereas the gen x and millennial writers on Velma just see it as a more lighthearted thing that can be made fun of.
I probably last watched Scooby Doo cartoons when I was 8, and I have zero attachment to the characters. I never would have watched Velma if it wasn’t for all the controversy, but last night I binged 4 episodes and (this is a safe space right?) I actually liked it. Like multiple laughs per minute! And that’s something I haven’t had from a show for a while.
The original characters are now 50+ years old, if you’re setting them in a modern context you’re not going to get character continuity- something’s gotta give! From what I remember of Scooby lore maybe what they’ve kept of the characters is kinda superficial, but who cares- the original characters had no depth other than catch phrases and outfits anyway.
Trying to create something brand new from a brand is a lot more interesting than obsessing over faithfulness to the original source, and I’m glad they did it!
p.s. I also kinda liked Ghostbusters (2016) so it’s possible that I just have really awful taste hehe
Mindy's other recent show, Sex Lives of College Girls, also went down this path in the second season. Sacrificing real character development and good comedic writing for obvious and cheesy politically/socially relevant story lines that resolve too cleanly. First season was actually good. Now its also trash. Sorry Mindy.
I saw a comment by someone that said the show appears to have been written by a mediocre AI that has been fed nothing but millions of progressive-tweets to learn from.
The dialogue is literally red meat for conservative “wokeness will destroy everything”-types out there. The show is cartoonishly (see what I did there) out of touch with the way real people talk and think.
I’ve always like Mindy Kaling, but it’s really tough to give her the benefit of the doubt on this. At SOME point, she must have watched an episode of the show and said “cool, publish this” I just don’t see how a rational human being who’s operating in good faith could ever do that.
The Scooby Doo psyop feels believable to me in the context that for example a lot of Netflix shows seem to be using this formula. In addition to the influx of derivative content, their unscripted shows in particular feel more purposefully toxic than ever, and discourse around them are triggering people who have been deeply abused in past relationships. In tandem, Netflix recently launched a platform "Tudum" that is intended to be like a Youtube/Twitter/Facebook Frankenstein so they can centralize and monetize discourse about their shows, and they've launched podcasts to drum up even more controversy around their toxic reality shows. Even though Tudum is a bust, I feel that the intention behind the creation of the infrastructure seems telling. I would also argue that Balenciaga has been on a similar kick and even though their last stint didn't go over well, a lot of people noticed that they dressed both Kim and Kanye during the early stages of their divorce despite articles that claimed they were at each other's throats. That divorce was another public/hyper-real event that people mostly just projected their own pain onto. So while Scooby may just be a bad show, the conspiratorial narrative around it does match what feels to me like a relatively apparent trend toward creation of content intended to trigger people and farm attention.
I think these TV writers are finally ready for the ultimate challenge: making a color-swapped reboot of the Power Rangers that is somehow racially controversial enough to make a few hashtags
I'm definitely gonna check that piece about rumble out, thanks for including that.
Kinda surprised that the nft guys actually got the game done. Of course the vibe is 2000s Era gross out culture which is the least fun part of 2000s era stuff. They never opt to go with some of the hallmarks of the 2000s like nu metal or the passion of the christ.
I think the velma/wb conspiracy would be cooler if it's true and they tried it for black Adam instead. Like black Adam is in the magic prison cause he's woke, kandaq has drag queen story hour, and the justice society explicitly fights the patriarchy.
I liked the tiktok update. Tiktok moves so fast it's hard to keep up with, but at least tiktoks weird hasn't led to women eating out of toilets.
Next time readers call you out for complaining about twitter but featuring twitter content just tell em to say it to @ryanpornstar!
The person who said that complaints of "everyone has short attention spans now" are mostly just ways to complain that the public doesn't like something you like/made really hit the nail on the head. We've been seeing accusations that every kind of media has been "causing short attention spans" going back over a century at this point. Recorded music, specific genres of music, movies, the radio, pulp literature, comic books, tv, video games, every different kind of computer. And there's never been any kind of real effect observed in scientific research to back this up, just very small studies showing results that vanish in larger studies.
It's all about people trying to find a big-if-true harm that they can blame their own unpopularity or the unpopularity of the things they like on, rather than being real. Especially among kids, where scientific research is pretty conclusive on "it's normal that kids have low attention spans" just like it's normal they have a hard time with really steady fine motor control or dealing with emotions compared to adults.
Respectfully disagree. Witness the number of people multitasking while watching movies... watching movies FFS!
Also, what about internet content? How many folks read, much less post entries on blogs nowadays? Is it not true that, on the whole, we went from...
- reading books
- to reading articles
- to reading tweets
and then even that got to be too much effort, so we watch 17 second TikToks.
Also, how many books did you read last year compared to 10 years ago?
Sure, this is anecdotal, but for me and my friends... the answer is sobering.
Oh, and the world listens to singles now because, apparently, it's too challenging listening to entire albums.
Yeah you're replicating precisely the common and baseless assertion of declining attention I mentioned! I guarantee you though, ever since TV broadcasting of movies became a thing in the 30s and then home video availability of movies in the 70s, you've had tons of people multitasking in front of movies.
There was no "going from reading books to reading articles to reading tweets to tiktok". People watching tiktok or youtube for that matter, are almost entirely replacing traditional TV and related visual media. People reading articles in a newspaper or magazine before the internet are extremely likely to have replaced that with simply reading articles online, in any of a wide variety of formats. People who listened to books on tape now listen to books on digital files; people who read in print now read more digitally. And of course a lot of the formats you had to use in the past to access the sort of writing you wanted have changed.
As for hard statistics, according to an early 2022 Pew Research report, between 2011 and 2021 the percent of American adults who claim to have read a book in any format (print, digital, audio) went from 78% in 2011 to lows of 72% in 2015 and 2019, and back up to 75% as of 2021 (years 2013, 2017, 2020 did not have data for this). Not a huge change at all, and frankly a lot of the people involved in the changes were probably the most marginal readers, those who only read a single book in the years they did read. Among the demographic breakdowns for 2021, there was a consistent decline in amount saying they'd read books from youngest to oldest - 83% of 18-29s read compared to 68% for 65+ (particularly telling because the youngest groups use sites like tiktok the most!).
To go back further in time though, data on reading is somewhat sparse! Gallup in 2005 reported that in 2005 83% of adult Americans read at least one book a year, in 2003 81% had, in 1999 84% had, that in 1990 81% did, and that in 1978 88% did. Frankly this would imply the majority of the decline from 1978 to 2021 took place before the cold war ended, especially since the stated margin of error on both the Gallup and Pew data was ±3% - which means the variance from 2011-2021 could be entirely statistical noise - and the same for the apparent changes recorded between 1990 and 2005.
We should also keep in mind how broad a category a "book" even is. Reading a 32 page instructional book, a 60 page novella, a 500 page textbook, or a 1200 page monstrosity of a high fantasy novel would all be "a book". And we don't have very good stats for how those sorts of things have changed in people's book consumption over time other than rather slim informational volumes tending to be perfectly replaceable by reading a couple of articles online, or a novella being as likely these days to show up for free in a larger online site as it is to get sold separately.
And that should really go into the fact we tend to underestimate how much reading we do just browsing the internet, even when your main activity is looking at videos. You read a bunch of tweets, it doesn't feel it's adding up to a lot of reading perhaps, but you might well be exceeding how you used to skim the newspaper decades ago. Let alone when you're reading a couple articles or chatting with friends (text-based chatting being something that literate people did a lot of via mail long ago, which faded through much of the late 20th century as live phone calls got popular, and has resurged tremendously with the internet and widely available cell phones).
Though it's very funny to bring up singles in music as a "new" thing - you know that's really the only thing you could do for music for many many decades of recorded music right? That even by my grandfather's youth, a music album was still literally placing several singles into a binder for ease of storage and sale when a particular artist was selling very well or a record label had a good idea for a themed collection of various artists? And once you could really get an album on a single long-playing disc, you still had massive sales of singles all the way through to the late 90s even as formats changed. The only time singles weren't particularly popular in sales was roughly 97/98 to 2003, when their sales utterly collapsed in the face of album sales until digital storefronts revitalized singles sales and with the far lower prices of digital singles it was a no-brainer to spend on that. (And of course classic radio and modern radio in the form of streaming has always loved the single more than the album!)
But anyway to answer the last question you posed here, I'm reading much more books in 2022 versus 2012 or 2013 - as I've switched from still trying to pick up physical copies to leaning even more heavily on my ereader, there's simply a lot more for me to read! Heck, even just the difference from having to make a trip out to the library versus the library having e-lending for most titles, or just downloading versus waiting for amazon to ship or taking time out of the day to hit up a bookstore.
I think the assertion is not that folks no longer read books -- it's what percentage of media consumption comes from long-form content. 18-29 year olds have a higher percentage of reading books makes a lot of sense, given that's the age demographic of college and grad students. what is perhaps jarring is seeing this explosion of short-form content in the past decade+ (twitter, vine) and how tied it is to advertising (and music licensing) revenue, this incentivizing creators to game the system. we're so used to scrolling and swiping through content we do it while watching movies or during our workdays.
I actually also eat the biodegradeable packing peanuts. Not like, a lot, and mostly I do it as a prank to try to convince someone that I'm eating the styrofoam ones, but they do have a satisfying way of dissolving in your mouth. Stop looking at me like that, I swear I'm not crazy!
Wow. So much yes! That reference to TikTok and the music industry is something I've been thinking a lot about recently. Plus those videos stitched together - I'd never thought about it being content creators getting lazy... but I think that could well be the case.
I think what made the whole Velma controversy make sense to me was the stark divide between millennials and gen z on Scooby Doo. To anyone around my age who was watching kids' TV in the 90s, Scooby Doo was just an old show that was on a lot. I can't imagine many people passionately caring about the sanctity of that show. But since the 2000s, Warner Bros has been regularly producing new Scooby Doo shows that apparently put more emphasis on character. So gen z are coming at it from the view that you can't alter the sanctity of these meaningful characters, whereas the gen x and millennial writers on Velma just see it as a more lighthearted thing that can be made fun of.
Agree on the point about Scooby-Doo in the 90s being an "old show".
I probably last watched Scooby Doo cartoons when I was 8, and I have zero attachment to the characters. I never would have watched Velma if it wasn’t for all the controversy, but last night I binged 4 episodes and (this is a safe space right?) I actually liked it. Like multiple laughs per minute! And that’s something I haven’t had from a show for a while.
The original characters are now 50+ years old, if you’re setting them in a modern context you’re not going to get character continuity- something’s gotta give! From what I remember of Scooby lore maybe what they’ve kept of the characters is kinda superficial, but who cares- the original characters had no depth other than catch phrases and outfits anyway.
Trying to create something brand new from a brand is a lot more interesting than obsessing over faithfulness to the original source, and I’m glad they did it!
p.s. I also kinda liked Ghostbusters (2016) so it’s possible that I just have really awful taste hehe
Mindy's other recent show, Sex Lives of College Girls, also went down this path in the second season. Sacrificing real character development and good comedic writing for obvious and cheesy politically/socially relevant story lines that resolve too cleanly. First season was actually good. Now its also trash. Sorry Mindy.
I saw a comment by someone that said the show appears to have been written by a mediocre AI that has been fed nothing but millions of progressive-tweets to learn from.
The dialogue is literally red meat for conservative “wokeness will destroy everything”-types out there. The show is cartoonishly (see what I did there) out of touch with the way real people talk and think.
I’ve always like Mindy Kaling, but it’s really tough to give her the benefit of the doubt on this. At SOME point, she must have watched an episode of the show and said “cool, publish this” I just don’t see how a rational human being who’s operating in good faith could ever do that.
She literally wrote for The Office. We lost a beautiful soul
+
"...than if you just admitted that you’re a weird adult yelling about cartoons on the internet."
Thank you for boiling this down to what is essentially happening here.
It's a lazy just flat out wrong argument, like someone saying "why is inclusion in shows so important? They're just shows you're crying about"
The Scooby Doo psyop feels believable to me in the context that for example a lot of Netflix shows seem to be using this formula. In addition to the influx of derivative content, their unscripted shows in particular feel more purposefully toxic than ever, and discourse around them are triggering people who have been deeply abused in past relationships. In tandem, Netflix recently launched a platform "Tudum" that is intended to be like a Youtube/Twitter/Facebook Frankenstein so they can centralize and monetize discourse about their shows, and they've launched podcasts to drum up even more controversy around their toxic reality shows. Even though Tudum is a bust, I feel that the intention behind the creation of the infrastructure seems telling. I would also argue that Balenciaga has been on a similar kick and even though their last stint didn't go over well, a lot of people noticed that they dressed both Kim and Kanye during the early stages of their divorce despite articles that claimed they were at each other's throats. That divorce was another public/hyper-real event that people mostly just projected their own pain onto. So while Scooby may just be a bad show, the conspiratorial narrative around it does match what feels to me like a relatively apparent trend toward creation of content intended to trigger people and farm attention.
I think these TV writers are finally ready for the ultimate challenge: making a color-swapped reboot of the Power Rangers that is somehow racially controversial enough to make a few hashtags
I'm definitely gonna check that piece about rumble out, thanks for including that.
Kinda surprised that the nft guys actually got the game done. Of course the vibe is 2000s Era gross out culture which is the least fun part of 2000s era stuff. They never opt to go with some of the hallmarks of the 2000s like nu metal or the passion of the christ.
I think the velma/wb conspiracy would be cooler if it's true and they tried it for black Adam instead. Like black Adam is in the magic prison cause he's woke, kandaq has drag queen story hour, and the justice society explicitly fights the patriarchy.
I liked the tiktok update. Tiktok moves so fast it's hard to keep up with, but at least tiktoks weird hasn't led to women eating out of toilets.
Next time readers call you out for complaining about twitter but featuring twitter content just tell em to say it to @ryanpornstar!