If you really care about something, screen addiction does not interfere. A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.
But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.
The phenomenon observed here must be caused by a combination of the general loss of discipline (which is the fallback attentive mechanism when interest is absent) and students' disinterest in the field they chose to study. The former has been well known; the latter is worth considering more.
> But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.
There's a saying around here that roughly goes: few things are as successful in killing one's interest in something as pursuing a formal education about it.
Being innately interested in something is one thing, but then being in an environment when that is now a hard expectation is another.
It's like the difference between wanting to draw something and being forced to draw something. Entirely different playing fields.
That was my thinking too. Not everyone has been or will be interested in (slow) movies, but historically those people wouldn't be studying film. It's not exactly a lucrative field.
These “film students” are like the people who take computer science just because they like playing video games.
Most of their idea of film is putting together little reels and TikToks. “Absolute Cinema” type stuff. They don’t actually care about movies and the art.
You might be extremely interested in a field and yet not find every part of it to be so interesting. Certainly not everything I studied in my computer science degrees was something I cared about deeply. I've never studied film, but I'd wager there are a number of films that are educationally significant to watch but that aren't very entertaining.
From the same magazine that also recently published a piece headlined "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books"
I do have a print subscription to The Atlantic and appreciate some of their coverage, but it's embarrassing how much they're always on the lookout for upper-middle-class panics to milk...
I don't dispute the shortening of attentions spans, which seems to be directly related to new forms of entertainment young people consume.
However. Films across the generations are very different in terms of how they lay out a narrative. Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.
Art is highly contextualized by the period it's created in. I don't really think it's fair to expect people to appreciate art when it's taken completely out of its context.
Lawrence of Arabia, for example. What a brilliant, brilliant film. Beautiful, influential, impressively produced. And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing. I think it's my job as a professor to understand the context of the period, highlight the influential/important scenes, and get students to focus on those instead of having to watch 4 hours of slowly paced film making and possibly miss the important stuff.
The pacing is irrelevant in this context. As a student the main point of watching these movies is not entertainment.
Although I will say it's pretty amazing that someone that supposedly has an interest in film would not be able to watch The Conversation or an even slower film like 2001.
> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
It's not boring on a giant display with the original 6-track mix playing just a tad too loud all around you. I've seen it in 70mm at the AFI in Silver Spring, MD; candy for the eyes and ears.
It would likely be boring if played at a quiet volume on a small display. This is because movies are, in part, spectacle. Cirque du Soleil would likely be boring too if viewed very, very far away.
I guess that might be a modern interpretation. But I do disagree as well. I actually prefer older films because of the pacing, and fortunately live close enough to the TIFF cinema that I can see such films every other week.
> If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.
Sorry, but this to me sounds completely insane. We're not even talking about the general population here, but people who are ostensibly serious about the art and craft of film making. And the bar is being set at literally just watching the movie, and not even some obscure marathon of a film that takes a degree to be appreciated, but a major mass-released picture that has already been enjoyed by countless people.
No you're wrong. It's not about the era. Matt Damon talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast recently. He was asked by Netflix to create a big action sequence in the first 5 mins so that people on their phones would get hooked into watching the entire movie. He was also asked to mention the plot of the movie several times throughout the movie because people on their phones will tend to miss plot details and it helped keep them engaged.
This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way phones have changed attention spans.
No he's right, there is definitely a difference in pacing for films throughout the decades.
Much of the content that Netflix produces however is not made to be shown in a cinema like setting - its something that people put on while doing something else, like TV so whatever Damon was saying on a podcast makes sense in the context, its however not indicative of a whole generation of movies - there are still plenty of films being made that require full attention for an extended period of time, many of which are also on Netflix. One could argue that there was never a time in history where more excellent, deep and complex content was being made.
One other part is also that traditional TV (which arguably also never required full attention) has been replaced by new mediums. Personally I never owned a TV in my life.
The whole argument "phone bad" is a bit lazy IMO and doesn't at all take in account the nuance that would be required for a serious discussion.
Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation?
The information density of a slow 1970s drama is incredibly low compared to the multi-stream environment they grew up in. They aren't necessarily 'dumber'; their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information processing, whereas cinema is optimized for immersion.
Is information density a meaningful metric for movies?
I'm reminded of Kubrick's long pauses, or the space scenes in 2001, which are there to set the tone or give the viewer time to consider the situation, not to deliver information.
It came out when I was a kid, and I loved every second of those long boring sequences in it. 2001 was totally unique. I've probably seen it more times than any other movie. Once my college dorm went to see it in 70mm. Great memories.
Because they can focus on different movies. Americans few decades ago found internarional movies boring, did not focused, but could focus on American movies.
I don't think people can focus on any movies anymore, period.
I used to host movie night for the friend group, because I was the one with a decent home theater setup, but we stopped because people just can't get through movies anymore. Same with family. We'd always put on a movie at night when family were over for a visit, but we don't anymore. Within 5 minutes of the movie starting, everyone's on their phones or getting up to do other things. Why even bother hosting?
I even let the guest(s) choose the movie so they're not subjected to all that boring "character development" and "establishing shots" in movies I go for, and they still can't make it more than 5-10 minutes. My teenage kid can't even make it through movies with zero quiet parts, designed specifically for that age group. Not into it at all--she puts YouTube on at 2x-2.5x speed and "watches" two videos at a time while playing video games.
It's also possible that long films were always an abomination, existing solely to pad the maker's ego, and they were only tolerated previously because the of a dearth of alternatives.
I like to imagine it's the same neurological phenomenon as Mal de débarquement syndrome[1], but as a result of spending too much time on one's phone, rather than choppy waters.
I do sometimes think about slow burn movies and how they are hard to find outside of Oscar bait type of pictures.
Just looking at kids movies, something like My Neighbor Totoro has many scenes involving ambient sound with no dialog or background music, and it’s a major contrast compared to today’s 3D dopamine festivals.
On the other hand, that might just be survivorship bias. I’m cherry picking the best kids movie of its decade and comparing it to Boss Baby 2.
Finally, I’d also say my default read of articles like this are that they’re probably idle “the kids these days are bad” concern bait.
A professor complaining that his students won’t do their homework is not new and it’s not news. It is a statistical certainty.
Avatar 3 is making a billion dollars on people willing to sit through a 2.5 hour movie.
My solution would be to filter them out: why are they occupying the seats of students who actually like and watch movies? Film school is wasted on the TikTok crowd.
"Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition."
Students telegraphing to the film world that a coming generation of consumers simply won't be going to the theatre. The article is framed as a tragedy about the students, but it's actually a tragedy about the professors and institution of moviegoing.
The reality is that the home movie experience is now better.
Seeing a film on the big screen was still a great experience back in the 80s and early 90s when the home experience was VHS and a smallish CRT with mono audio.
It started to change when DVD arrived, but then we reached the era of affordable large LCD TVs, blu-rays, and then streaming. And now a lot of people have a 'big screen' at home. With a volume control and pause button. Better drinks (including alcohol) and snacks without paying the premium price, without having to drive anywhere. And no kids throwing popcorn around, or other people talking during the movie or other phones going off during quiet moments...
(That and the decline of movies. Maybe I'm just getting old and miserable, but there's been very little that's got me excited in recent years. Maybe I'll get out to a cinema for Project Hail Mary, loved the book and the trailers look promising)
I love movies but in the last 5-6 years I've only been 3 times to the theater. Dune 1, Dune 2, and Oppenheimer.
Theaters in my area couldn't care less about image and sound quality. Audiences don't seem to care at all about movies. Most are either on their phones or talking.
I'm not paying exorbitant prices for such sub par experience. I'd rather watch the movie at home with 4K DV on an OLED display and an Atmos setup.
Why would someone study film if they're not interested in it? People have been bored by movies nearly as long as movies have existed; but historically I don't think those people would go into college to study it.
What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.
"... go into college ..." makes it sound like more of an active decision than it is for many students who treat it as four more years of high school. It's not surprising that such students might pick a major that sounds more fun (movies!!) than subjects they already find tedious (more math, more history, more foreign language).
I wish I'd taken a year off after high school to get a job and at least pretend to earn a living. I wonder whether I might have embraced college more if I had.
We traded books for films, and now films for short videos, always moving towards what is easier to enjoy.
Quite a while ago, books became a taste that needs to be patiently acquired. Someone starting to read today is more likely to develop the taste by gradually easing into books that demand more and more. Say maybe Huxley -> Camus -> Wilde -> Dostoevsky.
Now that short clips are here, the same has happened to films. The uninitiated need to sit through Scorsese, Hitchcock, Wilder, Kubrick, Altman before attempting Fellini, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Resnais.
And by the way, someone who is naturally inclined to love films (or books) won't be affected, even today. Am I wrong? The way they are described here, I would crush these film students.
I think TV series are bigger than films now. They have established characters and story line spanned over several shorter episodes with cliffhangers and recaps etc. Once you get into a series you follow it for several seasons. It's a preferred way to tell stories.
I usually prefer films over TV series because I find just these tropes tiring. I find TV series have quite inefficient story telling and spend most of its time trying to get me hooked to watch the next episode.
Jonathan Haidt recently made the point on Ezra Klein's podcast that while adults can take a break from phones and reset their attention/hormones in a couple of weeks, we don't know what impact similar addiction has on a developing mind. It's possible the addiction sets in much deeper.
I'm sympathetic to folks who grew up shaped by this. Not for nothing, but The Conversation also has a compelling start/end, but has a long, arguably slow, boring middle. So it's like being forced into withdrawal on hard mode.
> A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”
The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span", would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd had them.
I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue in suffering through boredom.
> I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span
No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few minutes of scene-setting should not feel painful.
Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies. Turn them off. Good movies are made by skilled directors who know better than to stick a big boring part in the middle. Taste is subjective, of course, but the middle & the end get made by the same person. If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either; by the same token, if you consistently need to skip through the middle parts of movies with great endings, you're probably skipping good stuff which you might enjoy if you had a greater tolerance for slower, more atmospheric cinema. It might seem like sitting through the slow parts of a movie would make the experience of watching it worse, but I've found that resisting my urge to pull out my phone during slow bits has made me enjoy movies more.
Habitually, I spend a lot of time with headphones on, listening to podcasts and videos and such. I find that if I do too much of this, though, it starts to get me down. Often the best thing for my mood is to take off my headphones and just sit with my thoughts for a while. I know what you mean by "suffering through boredom," but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.
> Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies.
Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-and-white.
> If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either
You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great ending -- which is actually an extremely common pattern. There's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".
> but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.
Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable. It's just making better use of your time.
A saggy middle is relative. It's one thing for the middle of a movie to be the least compelling part; it's another for the middle to be so dull that you have to skip it entirely. If a movie's longer than 90 minutes, then they had room to cut stuff, and they chose not to.
> Your analysis is extremely simplistic.
It's extremely general, is what. That's by necessity; we're not talking about any particular movie. Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
> Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable
"Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
> Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action.
> "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort. It's boredom, its own category. Why suffer that? Just speed up.
You're not the first person I've seen say that they do that with movies and I just can't put myself in your shoes. If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it, if I felt like juggling the fast forward for a movie I would just turn it off. It's like cropping the intentional negative space around a painting or skipping over dramatic silence in a musical piece. Tension and mood are built during those slow sequences. Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it
To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly.
> Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount across both seasons of The Last of Us. It's a great show, but I watch it for the personal relationships and stories and imaginative element. The "haunted house" parts feel like switching from a fascinating TV show to an amusement park ride, which has no interest for me. After 15 seconds of it, I've already got the tension and mood. I don't need 5 more minutes of it. It's incredibly repetitive.
But that's just me -- I'm sure there are other people who watch it for the suspense and zombies, and get bored when the personal relationship parts go on for too long. I'm not judging or even saying that the haunted-house suspense parts are bad, just that they don't have much interest for me.
Nobody watches the same movie, the same way no man steps into the same river twice.
Some people have trouble following plot. Some people excuse themselves to use the bathroom. Some people have trouble catching all the dialog. Some people close their eyes during the scary parts. Different elements call up totally different associations in different people's brains. If you watch a movie a first time and then a second time, they're different movies. So I'm OK with watching a different movie, same as everybody else.
Often, when there's a really powerful scene, I'll rewatch it two or three times before continuing, too. Because there's more richness than I can capture with just one viewing, and I want to feel like I experience it fully before moving on. So that makes it a different movie too. I'm not going to let someone else dictate my experience.
Movies aren't consumed as bit-perfect binaries to begin with. They're distributed as files that way, maybe, but even the basic viewing and sound conditions are different for everyone. Color fidelity, detail, acoustic muddiness due to room reverb. Literally everyone's watching a "differently patched binary" if that's how you want to think of it.
I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes.
Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.
I watch almost every movie at 2x and I think it usually makes the whole experience better for me. You can tailor your own media experiences however you want. If you disagree with a director's vision for a movie you can bring your own perspective, there's no right or wrong way to watch a movie. It's no different to picking out a specific track in an album, or finding a hook you really enjoy from a specific track and playing it on repeat.
One of the most recent movies I watched and really enjoyed was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was an animation masterpiece, but I still skipped forward in a couple scenes because I don't care about the characters. Some of the animation sequences were interesting enough to merit slowing down to 1x and even going back to rewatch and analyze them in-depth though.
Sometimes I'll encounter a seasonal anime that's quite terrible among multiple dimensions but which has few interesting aspects like creative art design or a couple interesting sequences, so I skim through it to look for those details in order to take them in. It's possible to appreciate various components of a work without caring for the combined result.
One of the things which helped break me out of the normative movie-watching perspective was encountering this art project where a social media page would post every Spongebob frame in order [0]. It made me really start paying attention to a ton of minor details that I hadn't noticed previously, increasing my appreciation for the work that went into making it happen.
In the past you really had no choice but to submit to the director's vision of a work, and you were forced to experience it the same as everyone else in the theater. Now we have more control than ever to enjoy works however we want. Game modding is another variation on this same principle: if I think a game has some bullshit mechanics, I should be able to patch it and play it however I want.
>I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Did you always do this or did you start doing this in the past, say, 10 years or so?
Agreed. There are lots of movies that are hard to watch. A modern one for many people is "The Green Knight". I made it to the end but personally the movie didn't do anything for me and I don't agree with the praise.
I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler and after the first episode or so where they stuck out it just got tiring. Made up example (Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport, wait in lounge, board plane, sit in plane, de-board plane, pick up rental car, drive toward city, shots of city, get out of car, see lobby, get in elevator, arrive on floor" for 2-3 minutes. You could argue a segment like this is supposed to convey tedium or the fact that the character is the only person in all of these shots, but that was established 3 episodes ago. Now it's just filler. A good editor would have cut it but a series like Pluribus has a contract to provide X hours of content, and so they fill it up.
Some movies I watched recently:
"The Long Goodbye" (1973) - I'm not recommending it but I found it interesting/different enough that I'm glad I watched it.
"Madame De..." (1953) - This one was too slow for me. I stopped about half way through. Nothing iteresting had happened.
"The Enchanted Cottage" (1945) - I enjoyed though it was as little cloying
"Marked Woman" (1937) - It was overly melodramatic but Betty Davis was great at being strong and, I had no idea hostess culture was ever a thing in the USA which I found fascinating. It's still a thing in many parts of the world (and I have no issue with it to be honest)
> I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler
When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies."
Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you might be holding it wrong.
> Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport
That is classic Vince Gilligan. He does that several times in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It's not filler, it's done with intentionality. You might not like it, but to say that an editor should cut that out is simply wrong. That's his distinct style, just like Wes Anderson has his own style, etc.
> But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Do you do this for movies you're watching on your own for enjoyment or that you're required to watch for some reason? I'm not particularly interested in film, and have adhd, but can't think of a time where I've ever done this, so it's hard for me to read your comment and think that while you may not struggle with attention per se, such a level of discomfort and impatience is like not being able to walk around without earbuds in, or go for a hike without a Bluetooth speaker or phone
> But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Those are typically the movies where I just end up turning it off and reading a synopsis. Some movies just aren’t that good.
And if I had great interest in the minutiae of set design, or if I were a score composer interested in the exact musical instrumentation, or a director studying suspenseful timing, then sure I'd be interested.
But I'm not any of those things. I prefer to spend my time on things I'm actually interested in, rather than on things I'm not. If I can fast-forward the "not" part, it makes life better.
If people are feeling entitled to a certain pace of spectacle and action as they write off everything in between as virtueless boredom, that's more damaging to the culture than a certain percentage simply no longer watching movies. That's how we get Netflix dumbing down their movies for everyone. There's nuance and value to a scene you may not immediately and consciously notice. And on a more meta level, pacing contributes to the overall experience of a movie even if there's not necessarily important subtext to a given scene that doesn't have action or explicit plot development.
Once you know about "Save The Cat!" it becomes boring to watch a movie that follows the formula.
I noticed even back in the 80s that too many movies ended in the "chase through the darkened warehouse". The movie will be doing fine, until somehow the hero and villain wind up in a dark, abandoned warehouse, ship, factory, whatever. Then they have a long, drawn out fight. Then the bad guy gets killed. Movie over? Nope. The bad guy rises from the dead and has to be killed again. Sometimes even a third time.
Then there are movies with the party of 10 people or so. The point is to kill them off one by one, each in a gruesomely different way, until the star is the only one left. Movies also telegraph who in the party is going to die next. It's the person who reflects on something innocuous, like "isn't it nice to hear the birds singing!". Dead meat, every time. The only interesting thing to do with these movies is make bets on the order of the deaths.
"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern, except for the last two seasons.
I try not to think too much in those circumstances. It's often better not to know, not to notice, though it's not always possible.
People like genre and formula; it's not necessarily a negative - pop songs follow structures and formulas over and over. Also, creative artists can innovate by varying those structures and playing with expectations that don't exist in less formulaic creations.
There is plenty of non-formulaic film (and other arts) if you want it? I'm sure you must know that.
Almost every movie has a plot. How formulaic. How droll!
I find these sorts of discussions to be strange. Yes, stories follow specific methods to convey them. Yes, conflict is part of that.
I will agree that too formulaic is a sign of the times. I find that many 60s and 70s movies were the most creative this way.
The 30s often had movies that were just plays on film. The 50s were where the process of filmmaking gelled into reality. Not just how to make shots, but also the gear like steady cam, and an entire special effects industry, stuntmen, whole crops of professionals becoming uniquely skilled.
The 60s and 70s were the first generation of those which grew up with film as kids. The new medium was more understood. Experimentation ensued.
Then it became more formulaic. At least, it seems the way to me.
I only watch movies that are a series of randomly seeded intervals of tones at various pitches, random colors, with static added in. This ensures I never watch anything formulaic or predictable.
More seriously, it is interesting when a movie breaks out of a formula, especially in well established tropes, like Disney movies. Moana or Encanto come to mind as they convey stories where there either isn’t really a villain (spoilers, Te’Ka is not the villain), and especially in Encanto the conflict is more internal family issues than anything else.
But sometimes it feels good to just watch those archetypal stories. I know people hate on Marvel but the Thanos arc with the infinity stones and the snap was such a fun ride, over the course of many years. These stories are extremely formulaic but still enjoyable because on some level we are wired to enjoy these stories.
I think you're projecting your personal perferences onto everyone else:
> genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring
> there's nothing to pay attention to ... suffering through boredom
They are genuinely that way for you, which is fine. Others feel differently and that's just as genuine and valid. For many, the film school movies are works of genius, wonders to behold and genuinely enjoy. Where you see 'nothing to pay attention to', others may see and feel quite a bit.
I can't acquire the sophistication to understand everything in the world - there is not nealry enough time in life. But if I don't have the understanding to taste the wonders of fine wine doesn't mean they don't exist or that the $10 bottle is just as good. I'm just missing out and others know more - that's most of life (and I listen to them and try to learn a little).
I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.
Perhaps as a film student you were meant to be looking at the composition, the shot structures, the color grading, the use of sound? The film may have been boring in its message or story but still a technical masterpiece?
If you’re really studying film, there is a lot to pay attention to in every scene. If you’re just watching films to be entertained, then yes, older movies have a slower pace and can sometimes be boring.
I think a film student would often be asking themselves why it was shot that way and what they might do differently.
Why did the author feel the need to throw in a spoiler for the end of The Conversation in the last paragraph of the article? That seems contradictory to the point of everything else she wrote and disrespectful to both the audience and the film.
The Conversation came out in 1974, 52 years ago. By any reasonable metric, the statute of limitations on spoilers has long ago elapsed. If we can't even mention that Rosebud is a sled without some sort of spoiler banner, I think we're letting our preciousness about spoilers get in the way of actually discussing film.
In defense of the students: the types of films that you watch as part of a film study curriculum are generally not the same as what most cinema-goers are watching. For example, "Man with a Movie Camera"--or 150 minutes of someone's black and white movie about the life of urban pigeons... present-day film students who grew up watching movies with tight editing, fast cuts, high resolution color and sound, and quick narrative payoffs are not going to respond to these movies the same way that people did a century ago.
This is not to say that historical films lack value; but sitting all the way through them with rapt attention is not necessarily as easy as you'd imagine.
Yeah but you have to watch Man with a Movie Camera with a good soundtrack like The Cinematic Orchestra one. Then it becomes the best non verbal movie ever.
The prior generation of film students grew up the same way, and the one before that. Remember westerns, for example?
If you're a film student, presumably you are interested in the art and technique, and then films like "Man with a Movie Camera" are fascinating and beautiful. Similarly, Vim does not appeal to a public accustomed to simple apps, no learning curve, gamification, and lots of graphics; but computer professionals see it as a thing of beauty.
I'm just about one month into a flip phone. I still spend way too much time on my laptop when I'm home (and I'm home a lot) but I'm not missing my iPhone at all. When I am out, though, it's nice not having the option to look at the internet. Instead I pet my dog, talk to people, or just look around and think like I used to all those years ago.
About as useful as telling a heroine addict to get off heroine, except that screen addiction is much more subtle in the harmful effects, but is incredibly corrosive over time. Almost all tech products in the world are pushing for more and more screentime, there is really not much regulation in sight, in the US at least(go Australia!). The best hope is that one day an Ozempic for screen time comes out!
Screen "addiction" isn't a real thing. Addiction is a specific medical phenomenon, not just any bad habit. Go find me a study in a medical journal that quantifies the physiological effects of smartphone withdrawal.
I do think people spend too much time on social media, but it's not helpful to frame this by analogy to something it simply is not. Bad habits are bad in their own right. We don't need to appropriate medical language to discuss them, and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad habit, and you can just turn it off.
When studies are published talking about “attention span” decreasing they mean the amount of time people spend paying attention to one thing. They don’t mean people’s capacity for attention is decreasing.
I’m a bit surprised to see this myth is still around, but looking at the source maybe I shouldn’t be
Often media forms make sense in their original context and make less sense the more the current context differs. In classical music orchestras, for example, many identical instruments play simultaneously, unlike in jazz or blues/folk/rock/pop. IMHO that makes more sense in a context without amplification, without few sounds are that loud (making it more special and dramatic), and in an industrial society where the common solution is lots of workers performing identical tasks. We can also think of media forms as technologies and see them similarly.
For video the context is shifting: As an hypothesis, the length of the media could be viewed as ROI for the required commitment. In the context where watching a film required going to a theater, 30 seconds or 30 minutes would be poor ROI - you plan, travel, give up everything else you're doing, pay ... you'd be unhappy if it was over in 30 minutes. In a context where the commitment is pulling your phone from your pocket and tapping it a few times, 30 seconds can be fine and you usually wouldn't want stand there for 2 hours.
Each form has advantages and disadvantages; I think it's a normal but clear error to say what came first, what we're more familiar with, is better. We do and will lose things with change, but we'll gain others. We don't lose them completely - there are still classical orchestras though no more riots over a premiere. But the energy of innovation is not in classical music, jazz or rock - people listen to the old stuff mostly - and maybe less in film. I expect that many of the young, innovative geniuses who in the past would have made classical music or jazz or rock, or written novels, are now making computer games - they are embracing the newish frontier, and the exciting thing of their youth.
So far, film seems to coexist pretty well; there seems to be plenty of creative energy on the high end, but we'll see. What about small independent films? What about film schools?
Short stories. At my high school (from which I graduated a few years ago) practically no one read anything assigned. Yet I observed in a short story class I took that at least the majority of students consistently read the stories, and this led to insightful discussions. High value ideas that are quick to absorb but slow to understand are a better avenue to appreciating long-form literature.
> Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.
This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.
They literally are customers. They pay money in exchange for an education and a degree.
You start failing too many students, it becomes a risky place to enroll, enrollment drops, they can't cover their expenses, and they close.
Edit: I'm not defending this, just explaining it. It's inevitable under a private education system, unless you literally legislate and enforce grading on a curve within all private institutions, which doesn't seem to be a popular idea among voters in free democracies either.
They are paying for the education, but not for the degree, and they’re not paying to get a passing grade even if they do poorly.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that we should just fail the students, clearly something is going on if the professor has to use a curve unexpectedly, but we shouldn’t just accept this as okay simply because they are paying.
Film studies is kind of well known for being a vanity degree for rich people's kids. At least all the film studies students I know from India who're studying in the US are without exception the kids of super-rich businessmen and politicians.
The serious ones are all either already working in the industry or studying at the super-competitive National School of Drama.
I think we're all in agreement about what should be the case, but in practice I think the majority are buying a degree and don't care about learning beyond the minimum they need in order to earn or fake their way into a job. Look at how people are flocking to AI. The typical person wants a button to press to give them an answer or complete a task. Every day we see headlines about people carelessly accepting laughably wrong LLM output.
Teachers/Professors are some of the biggest oppressors in society. They directly decide who gets to be poor and who gets to be wealthy.
Every negative grade they give is robbery of food out of your children's mouth. There's a reason they get their backs against the walls first during revolutions.
The book that coined the term "Meritocracy" was extremely critical of the concept for a reason. It is bad to try to have one and good to destroy the concept.
All 3 are WAY too long and Way of Water in particular felt like it was 4+ hours subjectively.
Yet, they're literally the biggest films EVER by gross.
So seems the general public has longer attention spans than film students. This isn't the first time that lay people are objectively better/smarter than so-called "professionals" in a field.
These are Hollywood blockbusters, not art films. You can keep a baby entertained for hours with CoComelon, but that doesn't mean they could get through Moby Dick.
This actually made me a little angry, to my surprise. :-D
I thought film student was almost like a holy calling, an opportunity that passed me by. Clearly, it's just the equivalent to another biz management course to some of these students.
If you have that passion, you should study film - it's never too late, and your passion will take you much further than the people just taking courses. You won't regret it.
It's like people in IT who went to some technical degree factory and got a certification, compared to those who took apart their parent's computer, figured out how to install Linux, hacked their own drivers and apps, etc.
It's been this exponential progress in distraction (internet, social networks, weaponizing human psychology to make money).
I got into programming in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were a teenager today, I'm not sure I would have the willpower to suffer through enough focused boredom to really learn.
And every line of dialog shown, no more than five words at a time, in all-caps and bold-faced yellow superimposed text in a font that resembles a comic book sound effect.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. A lot of the people currently running the world seem to have poor attention spans as well. Others have great attention spans, and I wish they'd pay attention to something different.
I'm not scared of the kids today running the world differently. Maybe it'll suck but I don't think the way it's running now is any great shakes, either.
I’m not being sarcastic. Running the world is more than just who is president… it’s who your doctors are, your electrical repairmen, your nannies, etc. It’s not like this is the only example of where the younger generation is different… we see reports everywhere that college students cannot read full sentences anymore. When you have such a generational lag (independent of outliers), it drags all of society down.
There is no attention-span crisis, it’s just that the younger generation find a lot of stuff utterly boring. If they do something they love, they have no issue focusing for hours and hours.
Being easily bored is the same thing as having a poor attention span. Of course they have no issue spending time on the things they love. If they struggle to focus on something, they probably will find themselves unable to enjoy it very much. I don't think any of the film students who spend the whole movie on their phones go home afterward to read Moby Dick.
This is reductive. It's true that interest conquers inattention, but the attention span crisis really represents a prioritization of exploitation over exploration. That is to say that many people are far less able to seek value in things which require more effort in the finding (e.g., long-form media such as books and movies). You could reasonably argue that this is not a real problem, but it is undeniably happening.
This is just not true. My daughter, who finds school boring to the point of depression, has no problem spending hours reading the complete Akira manga in a foreign language. The crisis you are talking about is not in the people, but in the system.
It can be both. I went through a very similar experience with school -- it was miserably boring to me, and I found solace in valuable and educational experiences I sought out myself at home. In this way I empathize strongly and I agree that the schooling system is massively flawed in this regard.
Still, from my just-as-anecdotal observations, it seems to me that social media addiction exacerbates the issues. I and many peers of mine fell out of reading for fun around the beginning of high school, and this was due in part to both technology and burnout from school. Screen addiction can be an obstruction to activities that one actually loves doing, just as school can.
Multiple teachers in my family report there is an attention crisis. And worse, the kids are addicted to their screens and even show signs of withdrawal in class. One case required professional intervention and the parents didn't seem bothered about it.
Just because the kids aren’t paying attention to the teachers, doesn’t mean they are having problem focusing. They are probably learning more from their screens, than from the teachers. When the only book in town was the bible and the only guy who had it was the priest, it made sense to have him front and center giving out all the answers. This is not the reality anymore and now kids can probably learn better by themselves. You should look into the work of Sugata Mitra.
If you really care about something, screen addiction does not interfere. A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.
But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.
The phenomenon observed here must be caused by a combination of the general loss of discipline (which is the fallback attentive mechanism when interest is absent) and students' disinterest in the field they chose to study. The former has been well known; the latter is worth considering more.
> But the article points out that the students here don't even watch movies themselves -- "students have struggled to name any film" they recently watched. Why are these people even studying film? The inattention is clearly caused by disinterest.
There's a saying around here that roughly goes: few things are as successful in killing one's interest in something as pursuing a formal education about it.
Being innately interested in something is one thing, but then being in an environment when that is now a hard expectation is another.
It's like the difference between wanting to draw something and being forced to draw something. Entirely different playing fields.
> When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.
I suspect that attention is naturally tuned to work towards genuine interests which may be orthogonal to conventional value producing tasks
That was my thinking too. Not everyone has been or will be interested in (slow) movies, but historically those people wouldn't be studying film. It's not exactly a lucrative field.
I wonder if the students are going into film but actually just want to work in social media in which case it all makes sense.
Good point. Maybe "film student" is the modern version of "studied art history".
When I was a student I studied a lot of things, I wasn't knowledgeable or good at much of any of them.
Sounds about right.
These “film students” are like the people who take computer science just because they like playing video games.
Most of their idea of film is putting together little reels and TikToks. “Absolute Cinema” type stuff. They don’t actually care about movies and the art.
Very little people really care about a hobby. The ones that do are the most visible but the huge mass just isn’t passionate.
You might be extremely interested in a field and yet not find every part of it to be so interesting. Certainly not everything I studied in my computer science degrees was something I cared about deeply. I've never studied film, but I'd wager there are a number of films that are educationally significant to watch but that aren't very entertaining.
From the same magazine that also recently published a piece headlined "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books"
I do have a print subscription to The Atlantic and appreciate some of their coverage, but it's embarrassing how much they're always on the lookout for upper-middle-class panics to milk...
I don't dispute the shortening of attentions spans, which seems to be directly related to new forms of entertainment young people consume.
However. Films across the generations are very different in terms of how they lay out a narrative. Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.
Art is highly contextualized by the period it's created in. I don't really think it's fair to expect people to appreciate art when it's taken completely out of its context.
Lawrence of Arabia, for example. What a brilliant, brilliant film. Beautiful, influential, impressively produced. And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing. I think it's my job as a professor to understand the context of the period, highlight the influential/important scenes, and get students to focus on those instead of having to watch 4 hours of slowly paced film making and possibly miss the important stuff.
The pacing is irrelevant in this context. As a student the main point of watching these movies is not entertainment.
Although I will say it's pretty amazing that someone that supposedly has an interest in film would not be able to watch The Conversation or an even slower film like 2001.
> And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
It's not boring on a giant display with the original 6-track mix playing just a tad too loud all around you. I've seen it in 70mm at the AFI in Silver Spring, MD; candy for the eyes and ears.
It would likely be boring if played at a quiet volume on a small display. This is because movies are, in part, spectacle. Cirque du Soleil would likely be boring too if viewed very, very far away.
>And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.
At no point was it "boring"
I guess that might be a modern interpretation. But I do disagree as well. I actually prefer older films because of the pacing, and fortunately live close enough to the TIFF cinema that I can see such films every other week.
> If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.
Sorry, but this to me sounds completely insane. We're not even talking about the general population here, but people who are ostensibly serious about the art and craft of film making. And the bar is being set at literally just watching the movie, and not even some obscure marathon of a film that takes a degree to be appreciated, but a major mass-released picture that has already been enjoyed by countless people.
No you're wrong. It's not about the era. Matt Damon talked about this on the Joe Rogan podcast recently. He was asked by Netflix to create a big action sequence in the first 5 mins so that people on their phones would get hooked into watching the entire movie. He was also asked to mention the plot of the movie several times throughout the movie because people on their phones will tend to miss plot details and it helped keep them engaged.
This is not about how movies are paced, it's about the way phones have changed attention spans.
No he's right, there is definitely a difference in pacing for films throughout the decades.
Much of the content that Netflix produces however is not made to be shown in a cinema like setting - its something that people put on while doing something else, like TV so whatever Damon was saying on a podcast makes sense in the context, its however not indicative of a whole generation of movies - there are still plenty of films being made that require full attention for an extended period of time, many of which are also on Netflix. One could argue that there was never a time in history where more excellent, deep and complex content was being made.
One other part is also that traditional TV (which arguably also never required full attention) has been replaced by new mediums. Personally I never owned a TV in my life.
The whole argument "phone bad" is a bit lazy IMO and doesn't at all take in account the nuance that would be required for a serious discussion.
I imagine a film student watching the baptism scene of Michael Corleone and thinking it is boring.
Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation?
The information density of a slow 1970s drama is incredibly low compared to the multi-stream environment they grew up in. They aren't necessarily 'dumber'; their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information processing, whereas cinema is optimized for immersion.
That's a way of saying that they need constant stimulation which is exactly an inability to focus or a loss of attention span.
"Information density" is not what works of art provide.
Is information density a meaningful metric for movies?
I'm reminded of Kubrick's long pauses, or the space scenes in 2001, which are there to set the tone or give the viewer time to consider the situation, not to deliver information.
It came out when I was a kid, and I loved every second of those long boring sequences in it. 2001 was totally unique. I've probably seen it more times than any other movie. Once my college dorm went to see it in 70mm. Great memories.
Kubrick has nothing on Tarkovsky who has nothing on even more longwinded directors.
I love some of Tarkovsky, but some of it is very slow e.g. Nostalgia and Stalker.
> Is it a loss of attention span, or is the 2-hour feature film simply an outdated format for the current generation?
Why would you think it's an outdated format for the current generation if not for their loss of attention span?
Because they can focus on different movies. Americans few decades ago found internarional movies boring, did not focused, but could focus on American movies.
I don't think people can focus on any movies anymore, period.
I used to host movie night for the friend group, because I was the one with a decent home theater setup, but we stopped because people just can't get through movies anymore. Same with family. We'd always put on a movie at night when family were over for a visit, but we don't anymore. Within 5 minutes of the movie starting, everyone's on their phones or getting up to do other things. Why even bother hosting?
I even let the guest(s) choose the movie so they're not subjected to all that boring "character development" and "establishing shots" in movies I go for, and they still can't make it more than 5-10 minutes. My teenage kid can't even make it through movies with zero quiet parts, designed specifically for that age group. Not into it at all--she puts YouTube on at 2x-2.5x speed and "watches" two videos at a time while playing video games.
It's also possible that long films were always an abomination, existing solely to pad the maker's ego, and they were only tolerated previously because the of a dearth of alternatives.
>their brains are just optimized for high-frequency information processing
Wow, is there any evidence of this?
I like to imagine it's the same neurological phenomenon as Mal de débarquement syndrome[1], but as a result of spending too much time on one's phone, rather than choppy waters.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal_de_debarquement
High-frequency infotainment consumption maybe.
I do sometimes think about slow burn movies and how they are hard to find outside of Oscar bait type of pictures.
Just looking at kids movies, something like My Neighbor Totoro has many scenes involving ambient sound with no dialog or background music, and it’s a major contrast compared to today’s 3D dopamine festivals.
On the other hand, that might just be survivorship bias. I’m cherry picking the best kids movie of its decade and comparing it to Boss Baby 2.
Finally, I’d also say my default read of articles like this are that they’re probably idle “the kids these days are bad” concern bait.
A professor complaining that his students won’t do their homework is not new and it’s not news. It is a statistical certainty.
Avatar 3 is making a billion dollars on people willing to sit through a 2.5 hour movie.
A 2.5 hour movie that don’t make any sense even.
My solution would be to filter them out: why are they occupying the seats of students who actually like and watch movies? Film school is wasted on the TikTok crowd.
"Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition."
Students telegraphing to the film world that a coming generation of consumers simply won't be going to the theatre. The article is framed as a tragedy about the students, but it's actually a tragedy about the professors and institution of moviegoing.
The reality is that the home movie experience is now better.
Seeing a film on the big screen was still a great experience back in the 80s and early 90s when the home experience was VHS and a smallish CRT with mono audio.
It started to change when DVD arrived, but then we reached the era of affordable large LCD TVs, blu-rays, and then streaming. And now a lot of people have a 'big screen' at home. With a volume control and pause button. Better drinks (including alcohol) and snacks without paying the premium price, without having to drive anywhere. And no kids throwing popcorn around, or other people talking during the movie or other phones going off during quiet moments...
(That and the decline of movies. Maybe I'm just getting old and miserable, but there's been very little that's got me excited in recent years. Maybe I'll get out to a cinema for Project Hail Mary, loved the book and the trailers look promising)
Also no forty minutes of ads before the actual movie.
That was my friends' recent experience and it was just ridiculous. They were late and still had to watch ads.
I love movies but in the last 5-6 years I've only been 3 times to the theater. Dune 1, Dune 2, and Oppenheimer.
Theaters in my area couldn't care less about image and sound quality. Audiences don't seem to care at all about movies. Most are either on their phones or talking.
I'm not paying exorbitant prices for such sub par experience. I'd rather watch the movie at home with 4K DV on an OLED display and an Atmos setup.
So Quibi had the right idea, just a decade too early?
Why would someone study film if they're not interested in it? People have been bored by movies nearly as long as movies have existed; but historically I don't think those people would go into college to study it.
What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.
"... go into college ..." makes it sound like more of an active decision than it is for many students who treat it as four more years of high school. It's not surprising that such students might pick a major that sounds more fun (movies!!) than subjects they already find tedious (more math, more history, more foreign language).
I wish I'd taken a year off after high school to get a job and at least pretend to earn a living. I wonder whether I might have embraced college more if I had.
Career prospects with better odds becoming a Hollywood film director than a Junior Developer in software in the age of AI? ;). (I joke, I joke.)
We traded books for films, and now films for short videos, always moving towards what is easier to enjoy.
Quite a while ago, books became a taste that needs to be patiently acquired. Someone starting to read today is more likely to develop the taste by gradually easing into books that demand more and more. Say maybe Huxley -> Camus -> Wilde -> Dostoevsky.
Now that short clips are here, the same has happened to films. The uninitiated need to sit through Scorsese, Hitchcock, Wilder, Kubrick, Altman before attempting Fellini, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Resnais.
And by the way, someone who is naturally inclined to love films (or books) won't be affected, even today. Am I wrong? The way they are described here, I would crush these film students.
I think TV series are bigger than films now. They have established characters and story line spanned over several shorter episodes with cliffhangers and recaps etc. Once you get into a series you follow it for several seasons. It's a preferred way to tell stories.
I usually prefer films over TV series because I find just these tropes tiring. I find TV series have quite inefficient story telling and spend most of its time trying to get me hooked to watch the next episode.
It helped that books were all we had. I probably would have preferred little snippets of dopamine, too.
I'm kinda glad I walked across campus glued to a book. But it was the same low tolerance for boredom that people show today.
Jonathan Haidt recently made the point on Ezra Klein's podcast that while adults can take a break from phones and reset their attention/hormones in a couple of weeks, we don't know what impact similar addiction has on a developing mind. It's possible the addiction sets in much deeper.
I'm sympathetic to folks who grew up shaped by this. Not for nothing, but The Conversation also has a compelling start/end, but has a long, arguably slow, boring middle. So it's like being forced into withdrawal on hard mode.
Counterpoint from the article:
> A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”
The article doesn't actually give any evidence attention spans are shortened. Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring, unless you're hyper-motivated. Before mobile phones, you didn't have any choice but to sit through it. Now you have a choice. I suspect that film students 30 years ago, despite having a "full attention span", would also have been entertaining themselves on phones if they'd had them.
I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to. There's no virtue in suffering through boredom.
> I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays. It's not that I suffer from a short attention span
No, I'm sorry, I do think this is an attention span issue. You say there's no virtue in suffering through boredom, but a few minutes of scene-setting should not feel painful.
Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies. Turn them off. Good movies are made by skilled directors who know better than to stick a big boring part in the middle. Taste is subjective, of course, but the middle & the end get made by the same person. If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either; by the same token, if you consistently need to skip through the middle parts of movies with great endings, you're probably skipping good stuff which you might enjoy if you had a greater tolerance for slower, more atmospheric cinema. It might seem like sitting through the slow parts of a movie would make the experience of watching it worse, but I've found that resisting my urge to pull out my phone during slow bits has made me enjoy movies more.
Habitually, I spend a lot of time with headphones on, listening to podcasts and videos and such. I find that if I do too much of this, though, it starts to get me down. Often the best thing for my mood is to take off my headphones and just sit with my thoughts for a while. I know what you mean by "suffering through boredom," but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.
Your analysis is extremely simplistic.
> Yes, some movies are boring, but those are bad movies.
Actually, in real life, otherwise good movies can have some less-good parts, and otherwise bad movies can have some individual scenes that are great. Life, and art, isn't black-and-white.
> If the middle isn't enjoyable, the end probably won't be either
You've clearly never taken taken a screenwriting course, or analyzed the many many movies with a saggy middle but a great ending -- which is actually an extremely common pattern. There's even a name for it, the "second-act slump".
> but it doesn't need to be painful to sit & do nothing for a bit. Once you get used to it, it stops feeling so uncomfortable.
Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable. It's just making better use of your time.
A saggy middle is relative. It's one thing for the middle of a movie to be the least compelling part; it's another for the middle to be so dull that you have to skip it entirely. If a movie's longer than 90 minutes, then they had room to cut stuff, and they chose not to.
> Your analysis is extremely simplistic.
It's extremely general, is what. That's by necessity; we're not talking about any particular movie. Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
> Nobody ever said anything about it being painful or uncomfortable
"Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
> Broadly speaking, if it's worth watching the end of a movie, it's probably worth watching the whole thing.
That's what I'm 100% disagreeing with. It might actually be worth fast-forwarding through some dark suspenseful parts with no dialog or meaningful action.
> "Suffering through boredom" was how you phrased it.
Right. It's boring. Boring isn't pain or discomfort. It's boredom, its own category. Why suffer that? Just speed up.
You're not the first person I've seen say that they do that with movies and I just can't put myself in your shoes. If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it, if I felt like juggling the fast forward for a movie I would just turn it off. It's like cropping the intentional negative space around a painting or skipping over dramatic silence in a musical piece. Tension and mood are built during those slow sequences. Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
> If there's nothing to pay attention to during those sequences then the whole movie isn't worth it
To the contrary, the rest of the movie can be great. I'm not going to skip a movie entirely just because a couple of sections could have been a lot tighter, that would be silly.
> Can you give an example of a movie you enjoyed but had to skip sections of that way?
Not a movie, but I found myself doing it a huge amount across both seasons of The Last of Us. It's a great show, but I watch it for the personal relationships and stories and imaginative element. The "haunted house" parts feel like switching from a fascinating TV show to an amusement park ride, which has no interest for me. After 15 seconds of it, I've already got the tension and mood. I don't need 5 more minutes of it. It's incredibly repetitive.
But that's just me -- I'm sure there are other people who watch it for the suspense and zombies, and get bored when the personal relationship parts go on for too long. I'm not judging or even saying that the haunted-house suspense parts are bad, just that they don't have much interest for me.
I'm OK with you re-editing the movie as you watch it, but you can't say you watched the same movie as other people that don't do that.
Nobody watches the same movie, the same way no man steps into the same river twice.
Some people have trouble following plot. Some people excuse themselves to use the bathroom. Some people have trouble catching all the dialog. Some people close their eyes during the scary parts. Different elements call up totally different associations in different people's brains. If you watch a movie a first time and then a second time, they're different movies. So I'm OK with watching a different movie, same as everybody else.
Often, when there's a really powerful scene, I'll rewatch it two or three times before continuing, too. Because there's more richness than I can capture with just one viewing, and I want to feel like I experience it fully before moving on. So that makes it a different movie too. I'm not going to let someone else dictate my experience.
But what you are doing isn't the same river twice, it's saying "it works on my machine" but not saying you patched the binary.
Movies aren't consumed as bit-perfect binaries to begin with. They're distributed as files that way, maybe, but even the basic viewing and sound conditions are different for everyone. Color fidelity, detail, acoustic muddiness due to room reverb. Literally everyone's watching a "differently patched binary" if that's how you want to think of it.
That's perfectly true, but like Heraclitus' river, you can have a very similar experience on more than one occasion. (After the first time, at least.)
I skip forward whenever someone starts singing, or there's a prolonged dance scene, or pointless montages with music. For example the Zion dance party in The Matrix Reloaded. Or the many movies showing people dancing at the wedding party for several minutes.
Taylor Sheridan shows: let's show a bit of nature with some country music playing for 20-30 seconds for no reason at all -- five times in a 42 minutes episode.
I watch almost every movie at 2x and I think it usually makes the whole experience better for me. You can tailor your own media experiences however you want. If you disagree with a director's vision for a movie you can bring your own perspective, there's no right or wrong way to watch a movie. It's no different to picking out a specific track in an album, or finding a hook you really enjoy from a specific track and playing it on repeat.
One of the most recent movies I watched and really enjoyed was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was an animation masterpiece, but I still skipped forward in a couple scenes because I don't care about the characters. Some of the animation sequences were interesting enough to merit slowing down to 1x and even going back to rewatch and analyze them in-depth though.
Sometimes I'll encounter a seasonal anime that's quite terrible among multiple dimensions but which has few interesting aspects like creative art design or a couple interesting sequences, so I skim through it to look for those details in order to take them in. It's possible to appreciate various components of a work without caring for the combined result.
One of the things which helped break me out of the normative movie-watching perspective was encountering this art project where a social media page would post every Spongebob frame in order [0]. It made me really start paying attention to a ton of minor details that I hadn't noticed previously, increasing my appreciation for the work that went into making it happen.
In the past you really had no choice but to submit to the director's vision of a work, and you were forced to experience it the same as everyone else in the theater. Now we have more control than ever to enjoy works however we want. Game modding is another variation on this same principle: if I think a game has some bullshit mechanics, I should be able to patch it and play it however I want.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/every-spongebob-frame-i...
> It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to.
Is it only me that think this is exactly a short attention span?
No, that's incorrect.
A short attention span is when you can't pay attention to things for a long time, even if you want to.
If you can pay attention to things for a long time when you want to, then you don't have a short attention span.
If you'd rather skip over the parts that don't interest you, that's just called using your time efficiently.
>I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Did you always do this or did you start doing this in the past, say, 10 years or so?
Agreed. There are lots of movies that are hard to watch. A modern one for many people is "The Green Knight". I made it to the end but personally the movie didn't do anything for me and I don't agree with the praise.
I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler and after the first episode or so where they stuck out it just got tiring. Made up example (Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport, wait in lounge, board plane, sit in plane, de-board plane, pick up rental car, drive toward city, shots of city, get out of car, see lobby, get in elevator, arrive on floor" for 2-3 minutes. You could argue a segment like this is supposed to convey tedium or the fact that the character is the only person in all of these shots, but that was established 3 episodes ago. Now it's just filler. A good editor would have cut it but a series like Pluribus has a contract to provide X hours of content, and so they fill it up.
Some movies I watched recently:
"The Long Goodbye" (1973) - I'm not recommending it but I found it interesting/different enough that I'm glad I watched it.
"Madame De..." (1953) - This one was too slow for me. I stopped about half way through. Nothing iteresting had happened.
"The Enchanted Cottage" (1945) - I enjoyed though it was as little cloying
"Marked Woman" (1937) - It was overly melodramatic but Betty Davis was great at being strong and, I had no idea hostess culture was ever a thing in the USA which I found fascinating. It's still a thing in many parts of the world (and I have no issue with it to be honest)
> I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler
When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies."
Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you might be holding it wrong.
> Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport
That is classic Vince Gilligan. He does that several times in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. It's not filler, it's done with intentionality. You might not like it, but to say that an editor should cut that out is simply wrong. That's his distinct style, just like Wes Anderson has his own style, etc.
>I love movies. But I also make liberal use of 2x speed
"I love pizza. But I also slather it in hot sauce to disguise the flavor"
> But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Do you do this for movies you're watching on your own for enjoyment or that you're required to watch for some reason? I'm not particularly interested in film, and have adhd, but can't think of a time where I've ever done this, so it's hard for me to read your comment and think that while you may not struggle with attention per se, such a level of discomfort and impatience is like not being able to walk around without earbuds in, or go for a hike without a Bluetooth speaker or phone
See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838651
> But I also make liberal use of 2x speed and +5s during interminably long suspense sequences that are literally just someone walking through a dark environment while spooky music plays.
Those are typically the movies where I just end up turning it off and reading a synopsis. Some movies just aren’t that good.
> It's not that I suffer from a short attention span, it's that there's nothing to pay attention to.
There is definitely something. Nothing to pay attention to would be a silent black screen.
Sure, technically speaking.
And if I had great interest in the minutiae of set design, or if I were a score composer interested in the exact musical instrumentation, or a director studying suspenseful timing, then sure I'd be interested.
But I'm not any of those things. I prefer to spend my time on things I'm actually interested in, rather than on things I'm not. If I can fast-forward the "not" part, it makes life better.
If people are feeling entitled to a certain pace of spectacle and action as they write off everything in between as virtueless boredom, that's more damaging to the culture than a certain percentage simply no longer watching movies. That's how we get Netflix dumbing down their movies for everyone. There's nuance and value to a scene you may not immediately and consciously notice. And on a more meta level, pacing contributes to the overall experience of a movie even if there's not necessarily important subtext to a given scene that doesn't have action or explicit plot development.
Once you know about "Save The Cat!" it becomes boring to watch a movie that follows the formula.
I noticed even back in the 80s that too many movies ended in the "chase through the darkened warehouse". The movie will be doing fine, until somehow the hero and villain wind up in a dark, abandoned warehouse, ship, factory, whatever. Then they have a long, drawn out fight. Then the bad guy gets killed. Movie over? Nope. The bad guy rises from the dead and has to be killed again. Sometimes even a third time.
Then there are movies with the party of 10 people or so. The point is to kill them off one by one, each in a gruesomely different way, until the star is the only one left. Movies also telegraph who in the party is going to die next. It's the person who reflects on something innocuous, like "isn't it nice to hear the birds singing!". Dead meat, every time. The only interesting thing to do with these movies is make bets on the order of the deaths.
"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern, except for the last two seasons.
I try not to think too much in those circumstances. It's often better not to know, not to notice, though it's not always possible.
People like genre and formula; it's not necessarily a negative - pop songs follow structures and formulas over and over. Also, creative artists can innovate by varying those structures and playing with expectations that don't exist in less formulaic creations.
There is plenty of non-formulaic film (and other arts) if you want it? I'm sure you must know that.
"Game of Thrones" was interesting because it did not follow any formula I could discern"
Introduction of character.
Dialogue.
Gratuitous sex scene.
Machiavellian discussion.
Reference to earlier episode.
Cliffhanger.
Yes, it's dasterdly!
Almost every movie has a plot. How formulaic. How droll!
I find these sorts of discussions to be strange. Yes, stories follow specific methods to convey them. Yes, conflict is part of that.
I will agree that too formulaic is a sign of the times. I find that many 60s and 70s movies were the most creative this way.
The 30s often had movies that were just plays on film. The 50s were where the process of filmmaking gelled into reality. Not just how to make shots, but also the gear like steady cam, and an entire special effects industry, stuntmen, whole crops of professionals becoming uniquely skilled.
The 60s and 70s were the first generation of those which grew up with film as kids. The new medium was more understood. Experimentation ensued.
Then it became more formulaic. At least, it seems the way to me.
I only watch movies that are a series of randomly seeded intervals of tones at various pitches, random colors, with static added in. This ensures I never watch anything formulaic or predictable.
More seriously, it is interesting when a movie breaks out of a formula, especially in well established tropes, like Disney movies. Moana or Encanto come to mind as they convey stories where there either isn’t really a villain (spoilers, Te’Ka is not the villain), and especially in Encanto the conflict is more internal family issues than anything else.
But sometimes it feels good to just watch those archetypal stories. I know people hate on Marvel but the Thanos arc with the infinity stones and the snap was such a fun ride, over the course of many years. These stories are extremely formulaic but still enjoyable because on some level we are wired to enjoy these stories.
Did you do that on the first 45 minutes of 2001? SCNR.
>Many of the movies you study in film school are genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring…
Case in point [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1965_film)
I think you're projecting your personal perferences onto everyone else:
> genuinely excruciatingly slow and boring
> there's nothing to pay attention to ... suffering through boredom
They are genuinely that way for you, which is fine. Others feel differently and that's just as genuine and valid. For many, the film school movies are works of genius, wonders to behold and genuinely enjoy. Where you see 'nothing to pay attention to', others may see and feel quite a bit.
I can't acquire the sophistication to understand everything in the world - there is not nealry enough time in life. But if I don't have the understanding to taste the wonders of fine wine doesn't mean they don't exist or that the $10 bottle is just as good. I'm just missing out and others know more - that's most of life (and I listen to them and try to learn a little).
Yeah given some are saying there's no difference, I'd probably put this down to "kids these days" that literally every generation imagines.
The word you are looking for, if you are looking for one, is declinism.
I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.
Perhaps as a film student you were meant to be looking at the composition, the shot structures, the color grading, the use of sound? The film may have been boring in its message or story but still a technical masterpiece?
If you’re really studying film, there is a lot to pay attention to in every scene. If you’re just watching films to be entertained, then yes, older movies have a slower pace and can sometimes be boring.
I think a film student would often be asking themselves why it was shot that way and what they might do differently.
We used to read books for 12+ hours, then we started watching films.
Why did the author feel the need to throw in a spoiler for the end of The Conversation in the last paragraph of the article? That seems contradictory to the point of everything else she wrote and disrespectful to both the audience and the film.
The Conversation came out in 1974, 52 years ago. By any reasonable metric, the statute of limitations on spoilers has long ago elapsed. If we can't even mention that Rosebud is a sled without some sort of spoiler banner, I think we're letting our preciousness about spoilers get in the way of actually discussing film.
She put it at the end of the article. If her premise is correct, it will remain safely unread.
Art isn't for everybody.
Indeed. But if film is not for you maybe don't study film?
In defense of the students: the types of films that you watch as part of a film study curriculum are generally not the same as what most cinema-goers are watching. For example, "Man with a Movie Camera"--or 150 minutes of someone's black and white movie about the life of urban pigeons... present-day film students who grew up watching movies with tight editing, fast cuts, high resolution color and sound, and quick narrative payoffs are not going to respond to these movies the same way that people did a century ago.
This is not to say that historical films lack value; but sitting all the way through them with rapt attention is not necessarily as easy as you'd imagine.
Yeah but you have to watch Man with a Movie Camera with a good soundtrack like The Cinematic Orchestra one. Then it becomes the best non verbal movie ever.
I'll add it to my list!
The prior generation of film students grew up the same way, and the one before that. Remember westerns, for example?
If you're a film student, presumably you are interested in the art and technique, and then films like "Man with a Movie Camera" are fascinating and beautiful. Similarly, Vim does not appeal to a public accustomed to simple apps, no learning curve, gamification, and lots of graphics; but computer professionals see it as a thing of beauty.
OK, phones & social media are obviously dangerously addictive.
Now what?
Install Davinci Resolve on your phone.
Get off them. Many started to already.
I'm just about one month into a flip phone. I still spend way too much time on my laptop when I'm home (and I'm home a lot) but I'm not missing my iPhone at all. When I am out, though, it's nice not having the option to look at the internet. Instead I pet my dog, talk to people, or just look around and think like I used to all those years ago.
Question, how do you fare with a flip phone and SPAM SMS/text messages? Smart phones can at least contain them, silence them, mark them as junk etc..
About as useful as telling a heroine addict to get off heroine, except that screen addiction is much more subtle in the harmful effects, but is incredibly corrosive over time. Almost all tech products in the world are pushing for more and more screentime, there is really not much regulation in sight, in the US at least(go Australia!). The best hope is that one day an Ozempic for screen time comes out!
Screen "addiction" isn't a real thing. Addiction is a specific medical phenomenon, not just any bad habit. Go find me a study in a medical journal that quantifies the physiological effects of smartphone withdrawal.
I do think people spend too much time on social media, but it's not helpful to frame this by analogy to something it simply is not. Bad habits are bad in their own right. We don't need to appropriate medical language to discuss them, and doing so is misleading. You can actually just stop using Instagram Reels. It's nothing like heroin. It's a bad habit, and you can just turn it off.
It's a bit more useful, in that the consensus on "phone use bad" is still a lot more shaky than "heroin bad".
Bring back the 90 minute movies!
The ability to focus is not decreasing.
When studies are published talking about “attention span” decreasing they mean the amount of time people spend paying attention to one thing. They don’t mean people’s capacity for attention is decreasing.
I’m a bit surprised to see this myth is still around, but looking at the source maybe I shouldn’t be
Then just don't pass them? Like of someone couldn't do calculus, you shouldn't give them credit for Calc 101.
Often media forms make sense in their original context and make less sense the more the current context differs. In classical music orchestras, for example, many identical instruments play simultaneously, unlike in jazz or blues/folk/rock/pop. IMHO that makes more sense in a context without amplification, without few sounds are that loud (making it more special and dramatic), and in an industrial society where the common solution is lots of workers performing identical tasks. We can also think of media forms as technologies and see them similarly.
For video the context is shifting: As an hypothesis, the length of the media could be viewed as ROI for the required commitment. In the context where watching a film required going to a theater, 30 seconds or 30 minutes would be poor ROI - you plan, travel, give up everything else you're doing, pay ... you'd be unhappy if it was over in 30 minutes. In a context where the commitment is pulling your phone from your pocket and tapping it a few times, 30 seconds can be fine and you usually wouldn't want stand there for 2 hours.
Each form has advantages and disadvantages; I think it's a normal but clear error to say what came first, what we're more familiar with, is better. We do and will lose things with change, but we'll gain others. We don't lose them completely - there are still classical orchestras though no more riots over a premiere. But the energy of innovation is not in classical music, jazz or rock - people listen to the old stuff mostly - and maybe less in film. I expect that many of the young, innovative geniuses who in the past would have made classical music or jazz or rock, or written novels, are now making computer games - they are embracing the newish frontier, and the exciting thing of their youth.
So far, film seems to coexist pretty well; there seems to be plenty of creative energy on the high end, but we'll see. What about small independent films? What about film schools?
Maybe try presenting them 15 seconds at a time, in portrait mode with bouncy subtitles.
On a tangent, maybe we can save reading by doing more flash fiction?
Short stories. At my high school (from which I graduated a few years ago) practically no one read anything assigned. Yet I observed in a short story class I took that at least the majority of students consistently read the stories, and this led to insightful discussions. High value ideas that are quick to absorb but slow to understand are a better avenue to appreciating long-form literature.
> Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.
This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.
They literally are customers. They pay money in exchange for an education and a degree.
You start failing too many students, it becomes a risky place to enroll, enrollment drops, they can't cover their expenses, and they close.
Edit: I'm not defending this, just explaining it. It's inevitable under a private education system, unless you literally legislate and enforce grading on a curve within all private institutions, which doesn't seem to be a popular idea among voters in free democracies either.
They are paying for the education, but not for the degree, and they’re not paying to get a passing grade even if they do poorly.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that we should just fail the students, clearly something is going on if the professor has to use a curve unexpectedly, but we shouldn’t just accept this as okay simply because they are paying.
Film studies is kind of well known for being a vanity degree for rich people's kids. At least all the film studies students I know from India who're studying in the US are without exception the kids of super-rich businessmen and politicians.
The serious ones are all either already working in the industry or studying at the super-competitive National School of Drama.
I think we're all in agreement about what should be the case, but in practice I think the majority are buying a degree and don't care about learning beyond the minimum they need in order to earn or fake their way into a job. Look at how people are flocking to AI. The typical person wants a button to press to give them an answer or complete a task. Every day we see headlines about people carelessly accepting laughably wrong LLM output.
Yes.
Teachers/Professors are some of the biggest oppressors in society. They directly decide who gets to be poor and who gets to be wealthy.
Every negative grade they give is robbery of food out of your children's mouth. There's a reason they get their backs against the walls first during revolutions.
The book that coined the term "Meritocracy" was extremely critical of the concept for a reason. It is bad to try to have one and good to destroy the concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
If the film students are not able to sit through a film, they just are needed to be kicked out, that's it.
How do I sqaure this circle with that the biggest films in the last two decades have been Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avatar: Fire and Ash
2h 42m, 3 hours 12 minutes, and 3 hours 15 minutes.
All 3 are WAY too long and Way of Water in particular felt like it was 4+ hours subjectively.
Yet, they're literally the biggest films EVER by gross.
So seems the general public has longer attention spans than film students. This isn't the first time that lay people are objectively better/smarter than so-called "professionals" in a field.
These are Hollywood blockbusters, not art films. You can keep a baby entertained for hours with CoComelon, but that doesn't mean they could get through Moby Dick.
This actually made me a little angry, to my surprise. :-D
I thought film student was almost like a holy calling, an opportunity that passed me by. Clearly, it's just the equivalent to another biz management course to some of these students.
If you have that passion, you should study film - it's never too late, and your passion will take you much further than the people just taking courses. You won't regret it.
It's like people in IT who went to some technical degree factory and got a certification, compared to those who took apart their parent's computer, figured out how to install Linux, hacked their own drivers and apps, etc.
From a programmer perspective:
(Old man yelling at the sky.)
It's been this exponential progress in distraction (internet, social networks, weaponizing human psychology to make money).
I got into programming in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were a teenager today, I'm not sure I would have the willpower to suffer through enough focused boredom to really learn.
Just needs to be broken down into series of scrollable short format clips with different dramatic snippets of distorted music over each one
And an outrage-inducing political bent.
And every line of dialog shown, no more than five words at a time, in all-caps and bold-faced yellow superimposed text in a font that resembles a comic book sound effect.
And mirrored to avoid copyright detection.
With someone peeling a carrot on half of the screen.
Don't forget Subway Surfers along the sides!
This is so tragic. How are these folks going to lead the world when they cannot pay attention to anything?
Just let AI run the world. It quite literally can't do any worse than our existing leaders.
Did kids pay attention 100 years ago?
If they did not they would lose some digits or limbs working unsafe machinery etc.
Kids no, students yes?
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. A lot of the people currently running the world seem to have poor attention spans as well. Others have great attention spans, and I wish they'd pay attention to something different.
I'm not scared of the kids today running the world differently. Maybe it'll suck but I don't think the way it's running now is any great shakes, either.
I’m not being sarcastic. Running the world is more than just who is president… it’s who your doctors are, your electrical repairmen, your nannies, etc. It’s not like this is the only example of where the younger generation is different… we see reports everywhere that college students cannot read full sentences anymore. When you have such a generational lag (independent of outliers), it drags all of society down.
30 seconds at a time
There is no attention-span crisis, it’s just that the younger generation find a lot of stuff utterly boring. If they do something they love, they have no issue focusing for hours and hours.
Being easily bored is the same thing as having a poor attention span. Of course they have no issue spending time on the things they love. If they struggle to focus on something, they probably will find themselves unable to enjoy it very much. I don't think any of the film students who spend the whole movie on their phones go home afterward to read Moby Dick.
Not too long ago, reading books was also considered evil. It was argued that they were addictive and antisocial.
You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.
This is reductive. It's true that interest conquers inattention, but the attention span crisis really represents a prioritization of exploitation over exploration. That is to say that many people are far less able to seek value in things which require more effort in the finding (e.g., long-form media such as books and movies). You could reasonably argue that this is not a real problem, but it is undeniably happening.
This is just not true. My daughter, who finds school boring to the point of depression, has no problem spending hours reading the complete Akira manga in a foreign language. The crisis you are talking about is not in the people, but in the system.
It can be both. I went through a very similar experience with school -- it was miserably boring to me, and I found solace in valuable and educational experiences I sought out myself at home. In this way I empathize strongly and I agree that the schooling system is massively flawed in this regard.
Still, from my just-as-anecdotal observations, it seems to me that social media addiction exacerbates the issues. I and many peers of mine fell out of reading for fun around the beginning of high school, and this was due in part to both technology and burnout from school. Screen addiction can be an obstruction to activities that one actually loves doing, just as school can.
Good point.
Multiple teachers in my family report there is an attention crisis. And worse, the kids are addicted to their screens and even show signs of withdrawal in class. One case required professional intervention and the parents didn't seem bothered about it.
Just because the kids aren’t paying attention to the teachers, doesn’t mean they are having problem focusing. They are probably learning more from their screens, than from the teachers. When the only book in town was the bible and the only guy who had it was the priest, it made sense to have him front and center giving out all the answers. This is not the reality anymore and now kids can probably learn better by themselves. You should look into the work of Sugata Mitra.
Drug addicts can enjoy drugs for hours and hours /s