There are so many new venues for media out there that didn’t exist a decade ago. You have You Tube, Deviant Art, YTMND, and several good music sites. All of these are great forms of expression for artists. But lately, I’ve gone back to reading books again.
I’ve been getting the feeling lately that our attention spans keep going down. There are some fantastic flash animations, images and video shorts out there – but it has taken up the attention space of telling stories with substance.
Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places – but despite all the new forms of expression, it seems like we haven’t really seem much meaningful work. The field is dominated by a girth of fleetingly amusing or interesting snippets. Some things gratify my attention for a few minutes, only to be forgotten a few days later. Others allude to an enticing tip of an iceberg - only to find that the creator created nothing that exists beyond it. Just empty shells of promising ideas.
It isn’t that I don’t like many of the things out there: I just wish I saw some inkling of things with substance now and again.
But maybe that’s not the web’s strength. Maybe I’m just hoping to find depth in the wrong places.
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It's interesting that, in your discussion regarding information technology and the communication of ideas, albeit in the form of entertainment, the greater implications upon wholistic honest understanding of what drives people is inherently unavoidable. I'm talking about how if you look at the increasingly fleeting attention span of individuals, and let's call them American to narrow things a tad, and their apparent need to be entertained by surface-level aspects of society and their lives, you cannot avoid a comparison to religion. Communication avenues are bountiful and most predict an age where we are so connected to one another that we ironically don't have to interact in person. Even now, a majority of what we all have in common has nothing to do with us, like entertainment fodder, and yet, we seem to know it's bogus. Ha cha, close the blinds. I look around and wonder whether people are aware that they aren't listening, rather, they're adhering to a belief that there's something to hear because, well, others say it's worthwhile. There isn't thought. Thinking is tough. So let's not actually believe we're lazy, that would undermine one's self-identity cause, who wants to be that person, and instead let's find common ground and entertainment, a constant bombardment of communication outlets leads to said ground, commonly. It's fooling one's self and what's the harm? There are real effects and again, like religion, most people don't like to acknowledge real effects, or realization for that matter because, then things get real scary.
Good observation. I suppose it also depends on what you consider "substance" to be. I believe that's relative, and as the world's attention span decreases, younger generations tend to feel "fulfilled" with shorter bursts of emotion and insight than previous generations may have required.
On the other hand, our ability to process information has greatly increased, which is why I don't watch many films anymore -- because I can usually intuit 90% of a film's impact from its 30 second trailer.
Find me a person who can pack 90 minutes of roller-coaster emotional and intellectual punch into a well-designed 30 second short film and you'll have the next generation of video-based communication...
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