I mean… looking at Shorts and Reels it’s definitely not making anyone smarter. There’s 0 value to it.
I’d say it depends. I’ll admit to spending inconsistent amounts of time a day on shorts. Some days none at all, but some (typically stressful) days I’ve probably lost 1-2 hours. The content I’m getting is mostly cooking, horror movies/gaming, education, and health and fitness related. Through it I’ve found content creators with podcasts and have found some motivation to make exercise an achievable part of my daily life.
Is there a sea of toxic bullshit out there? Absolutely. But there’s also some freshwater lakes and rivers. It’s why media literacy needs to be included in education along with critical thinking.
There’s a lot of people here unable to recognize how important attention span is for deep, meaningful learning.
Way too many people saying “ATTENTION SPANS NOT INTELLIGENCE DUHMASSES” and failing short because they don’t have the attention span to think of implications of decreased attention span.
Long term memory is built on repetition and attention. It is entirely plausible that short form media makes you stupider - by impacting your ability for deep learning
Imagine if your computer was extremely high spec, but could only run any process for a maximum of about 20 minutes. That would be… Just awful.
That being said, it looks like this study is pretty flawed.
It started way back in the days of cable. I remember how jarring it was to see a music video on MTV that kept changing camera shots. I was like, “you don’t even get enough time to get a good look at the band or the scene.” Then it got worse, way worse.
They have been programming people for short attention spans forever now and I hate it.
I think I figured out the dynamic at play here
Its basically that context switching is costly and since the internet has our attention/context switching spread thin between things like admin/messaging/learning/etc constantly we make our bandwidth really small so usually by the middle of the day our brains are fried if we changed contexts a lot even if we didn’t do much, and what’s worse is that to compensate for feeling like we didn’t do much we may just doomscrolling more to feel like we gained something so it just spirals and gets worse unless we do something about it.
What I suggest we do is recalibrate to having our baseline be as dead simple in terms of relaxing as sitting still staring at the wall or something, doing almost nothing, and then if we want to do something it should be something that we can steadily do for a couple hours at a time, anytime we have something to do later such as socials on a phone or something to google later we should note it down somewhere and eventually we create a todo list of those sorts of things that will last a couple hours so that we can do that without much context switching, and if we still need to recalibrate we can always stop and be still for some time.
At first this seems less fast but it is actually more fast because you gain more higher quality time in which we are working more efficiently at whatever we may be doing at any moment.
We aren’t getting dumber by using the internet, we are just getting very biased towards information overload.
This can even lead people to developing weird reward cycles that look like autism as well as people doing a lot of things at once so people call this adhd. We can use meds to increase bandwidth, that’s basically what ADHD meds are doing, closing the reward loops so that bandwidth is freed up, what very few do is learn to close the reward loops themselves and chunk similar things together so people functioning normally look like they have superpowers as a result.
As a result of doing these things I see my hrv increase due to stress relief because I’m not taxing my brain extra hard all the time and my sleep quality increase because there is not anything being carried over into sleep to be processed which also means dreams get an all around boost as well as clearer thinking throughout the day because I’m not taxed constantly. Doing this even slightly seems to show a lot of positive things just even a day later.
I am on the same path. I used to write down to-do lists but stopped, need to get back on it.
Curious about memes as well.
They did not in fact find that the shorts are making you dumber. They said it affects your attention span.
Ironically I found this out in the first sentence of the article and then stopped reading.
Wouldn’t the knock-on effects of a reduced attention span pretty much look like ‘dumber’?
Intelligence is intelligence you can’t reduce it by watching cat videos
Sure, but “being dumb” isn’t an exclusive club for people with low intelligence. There plenty of very smart people that are also dumb. Hell, most AIs could be classified as smart but dumb.
Yeah I can’t imagine it making me dumber. Most of my shorts are interesting scientific facts/discoveries. Or CSS tips and tricks.
Attention span I can definitely believe.
Yeah cause Ibuprofen
Those things are ADHD honeypots. I have never experienced something that is so close to hard drugs before.
So do stupid fucken click bait headlines.
That’s Dexerto for you, business as usual for them.
No, they are making you dumber. I don’t use YouTube/Instagram/TikTok at all nor any other video/short platform.
No shit
I’m sure the title here is accurate summary of the conclusion of the study and I don’t need to even check because as a person who doesn’t conscume short-form media this confirms something I already know to be true about myself.
eh. good luck. i am already
They said the same thing about Sesame Street in the 1970’s
I turned out all right.
WOW! 3 downvotes for saying I’m all right.
And no stated reason. Could be a troll farm. A Russian troll farm, or maybe a Christian troll farm. They don’t like me thinking too. It might be my EX, we still don’t get along.
I could even be Nestlé. My DECADES-long boycott is finally working.
Ah, you too live in a trash can and crave cookies?
