We are amusing ourselves to death. Video, TV, movies, music, podcasts, and on top of that, constant notifications—they're all flooding in. We are always being stimulated, and as a result, it is killing our ability to focus. This isn't just something that we've noticed about

ourselves; research backs this up. Attention spans are declining. It's easy to blame the internet for this problem, but it's actually much older than that, though the internet's made it worse. And if we want to do something about it, we need to be able to break down the

problem and really talk about where it comes from. So that's what we're going to do today. So I'm breaking this problem down into three parts, and it all begins with a shift from books to television. So in the 1980s, Neil Postman

wrote the book *Amusing Ourselves to Death*, and he was primarily interested in the cultural effects of a shift from using the written word as our primary way to transfer information to a shift towards mass media, and in particular, television. The invention of the printing press changed the world; suddenly, mass

communication was possible on a scale that had previously been impossible. And this is how new and radical ideas were able to so quickly spread. So the Protestant Reformation probably wouldn't have happened without the printing press, or the Enlightenment, or the American Revolution. But media

theorists like Postman—and here we should also mention the work of Marshall McLuhan—also tell us that how we communicate ideas, the media that we use, actually changes the way that we think. McLuhan's favorite phrase here was "the medium is the message." So Postman uses early

American culture as an example of what he calls the typographic mind. This is a mind that has been shaped primarily through consuming books, and that means that it's a mind that's used to prolonged sessions of engaged, serious, rational activity. In other words, it's a mind

that's used to focusing. So that's the first takeaway: reading as an activity actually helps build your focus and it shifts the way that you think. But we've stopped reading. In Postman's time, more people were watching television than reading, and those numbers have only

gotten worse. When you add screens and the internet and phones and all of that, which we'll talk about later, well that just exacerbates the problem. Two famous examples from American political history actually illustrate this really well. The first one is the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas

debates. These are famous pieces of American political rhetoric; you should read them if you're at all interested. Some sources say that up to 18,000 people attended these debates, and they were later printed—that's how you can read them—and it's actually how Lincoln

became famous in the first place. So each debate was 3 hours long and it would actually begin with a 60-minute opening statement from one of the candidates, and then there was a highly structured format with prolonged responses. This meant that the audience had to be able to stay focused for 3

hours and also needed to be able to follow a single complex thought for up to an hour, or sometimes 90 minutes at a time. And Postman says that they're able to do this because this audience, which would have mostly been literate people, would be used to following long trains

of thought, because they had been reading books. And when you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you actually see orators speaking in long, complex sentences. How they speak is actually being influenced by the kinds of sentences that they would have read. But if you

skip forward to 1960 and the Kennedy-Nixon debates, you see something really different. Because these were the first political debates that were on television, so instead of an hour for an opening statement, the entire debate was only an hour, and the opening statement that

each candidate got was only 8 minutes. This meant that the audience watching at home didn't have to worry about following one thought for up to an hour or 90 minutes. Instead, they just got it in small, condensed chunks of information that they could more easily

consume, and that mirrors their general media consumption that they would get from watching television all the time. The whole debate was only an hour; it literally was—it was one slot of prime-time television. And you know what the big takeaway of that debate was? It was that

Nixon looked bad on TV. That's why people say that he lost. Kennedy looked better on TV. Nixon's mom called him to ask him if he was sick. Generally, he just didn't perform well in front of the camera, and he lost the election. Political history,

or probably world history, was made because of television. So already, the media that we were consuming was changing the way that we were going to engage in politics. That's a big, consequential change if you think about how much power an American president has. Television was making us used to

consuming smaller, bite-sized pieces of information. And it also made us more concerned with things like the appearance of a presidential candidate rather than what he was saying. I imagine that if they had tried to have a three-hour debate on prime-time television, ratings would have slowly declined. People weren't used to focusing for three hours at a time anymore.

The media we were consuming was changing our ability to think, and it was causing our ability to focus to atrophy. Focus is a skill that you have to develop, and if we're watching television all the time, well, we aren't training ourselves to be deep and reflective thinkers, especially not in the way that we would if we were reading good books.

So then, when it comes time to focus on something like trying to read a really good book, well, you can't do it. You never learned how. People will often tell me that reading books nowadays is inefficient and that there are just better ways to get information. And um, I'm going to use some slang here that I think I'm too old to use sincerely, but uh, this is pure cope.

Getting your information from summaries or even from YouTube videos, like the ones that I make, is a completely different experience than learning from a book because in a book you actually get to follow an author's chain of thought.

So, as you read an author's thoughts in a book, you are actually thinking with him; you're actually training yourself to think. And as you train yourself to think, you're training yourself to focus. You get like a mental workout when you read, and you're not getting that elsewhere.

at your screen right now because TV certainly isn't the most important form of media that we encounter nowadays. A cable news show gets fewer nighttime viewers than a really good YouTube video these days, and maybe the fact that we can't focus is due to the internet and

the constant amount of notifications and this, like, swarm of content that we're constantly in. Or, in other words, you might think that it's this that's to blame, and I think that's right. Just like we shifted from books to television, we've now moved from television to the

internet, and that's a different way of thinking about information. Postman couldn't write about the internet because he was writing in the 80s, but another writer has come along to try to pick up some of these thoughts, and that's Nicholas Carr, who wrote the book *The*

Shallows*. So if you had to describe it in one word to sort of sum up your experience of the internet, I have a feeling it would be something like chaos. The whole point of a page on the web is actually just to keep you looking at it. So if you

look at, like, say your YouTube home screen, you're going to see rows and rows of videos; then you're going to see possibly notifications, if you have any of those turned on; you're going to see a search bar that tells you that you could go find anything that you wanted if you

search for a video. Well, then very quickly you're going to be given recommendations. Click on one video, and you're immediately recommended like 12 more. The whole point of that design is that if you ever get bored for even a second, you can click on something else.

So that you can stay engaged. We're so used to it that it feels normal, but it is a chaotic experience. And I think YouTube is not even the worst offender by far. I mean, look at TikTok. I don't really use TikTok, but when I've opened

the app like twice, I feel like I got a headache almost immediately. And I know I sound—I sound old in this video. The idea here is to always give you something to click on next; always. So even if you are watching a 10-minute video and you think

it's a really good 10-minute video, and you want to finish it until the end, well, if you're bored for even a second, you have something that could be potentially more exciting you could click on. And you could see because these platforms actually don't really

care if you keep watching one particular video or if you keep reading one particular article; they just want you to stay on the platform. TikTok wants you on TikTok; YouTube wants you on YouTube; The New York Times wants you to stay on the New York Times site. That's how the

internet works. This medium teaches you that information is easy and disposable. If you're even a little bit bored, you can move on; in fact, you should move on. That's—that's implicitly what these platforms are telling you. In Carr's book, he really likes to stress the plasticity

of our brains; that's our ability to change, actually, how our brains are structured in response to our environments. Our brains actually change based on what we do, what we need to do, and what kind of tools we use. So look at this chart for the average screen time

For Americans, and now ask yourself, what do you think that is doing to our brains? Well, one of the things is it's ruining our ability to focus. The bad news is that your brain is plastic, so the fact that you use your phone all the time or

that you watch too many YouTube videos means that you are slowly ruining your ability to focus. The good news, though, is that your brain is plastic, so you could fix this if you made an effort to read more books, watch less YouTube, throw your phone into, like, the fires of Mount

Doom so it could never bother you again. Well, that would actually give you a way to save your ability to focus. This really is a solvable problem, but you have to remember that there is a war going on for your attention, and it is not a fair fight. There are

large corporations with PhDs in psychology and the best design engineers that they can find, all working to keep you engaged. And that's why I like to say that the internet is a hostile design environment. So here's a quote from the first president of Facebook, Sean Parker:

The thought process that went into building these applications—Facebook being the first of them—was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? And that means we need to sort of give a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented

on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's just one very telling admission from someone who would know. If you listen to other people talk about designing digital experiences, though, it really is basically the same; it's all about capturing and really holding on to

Your attention, by comparison, something like this: a book. It's not that good at holding your attention unless you're really used to giving your attention to it. I think that's a nice way of putting it.  Books: you have to give your attention to books. But phones, screens, the internet,

videos—they steal your attention. That's why I say that it's a hostile design environment. It is an environment that has been designed in order to steal your attention and thus rob you of your ability to focus as much as possible, because people make money from it. I mean,

look, I have to even say this: if I can keep you watching until the end of this video, I make more money. And the people who design these platforms, they're not thinking about what this does to you long-term. Steve Jobs told the New York Times that he wouldn't let his kids

use an iPad, and Mark Zuckerberg and his wife don't let their kids use Facebook. I don't even know if they let their kids have phones. Basically, these are people who would really know the effects of these technologies; they help to design and build them and popularize them, and

they know what it does to people, and they wanted to protect their kids from that. So I would ask: why don't you want to protect yourself from that? Now, there are things you can do to build your focus, but they're all easier said than done. First, you you have to turn off your

phone. You have to learn to take long breaks from it. If you can take long breaks from it, if you can go an entire day without looking at your phone, then you're already well on your way. But you have to get used to it. Having something

In your pocket, that can always grab your attention with a single sound or a buzz, or even if you have it on silent, the ability—the sort of promise that if you just turned it on, maybe you would find something fun—that is going to rob you of your ability to focus. Next, you want

to start consuming media that actually demands that you pay attention. This could even be movies; it doesn't always have to be books. But if you're going to watch movies, they can't be those new Netflix movies, because those movies are actually being written and produced with

the intention that you will watch them while you're also scrolling on your phone. Like, they're made for people who are distracted. It's already changing the way that we make art. So watch actual good movies; go to a movie theater that will kick you out if you turn your phone

on. And the third way is probably the most important: get used to not being digitally stimulated all the time. Go on morning walks and don't take your phone at all. Just go and be there with your thoughts; maybe even see how long you can

go on that walk while you sustain a thought in your head—you know, thinking through an idea, debating with yourself. Just try it out; it can be more fun than it sounds. The point is to just get used to not needing to be stimulated by a phone or by a screen all the time, and by

doing that, we are going to be training our brains to actually rewire themselves; we're actually then encouraging our minds to get used to focusing again, and maybe we can make a little bit of progress, and we'll actually be able to focus on things that we care about.

Why we can't focus.

Jared Henderson

주의 집중 시간 감소와 책에서 텔레비전으로의 전환

다양한 미디어의 지속적인 자극은 집중력에 부정적인 영향을 미칩니다.

연구에 따르면 인터넷으로 인해 집중력 저하가 악화되는 문제가 확인되었습니다.

이 문제는 책에서 텔레비전으로의 전환부터 시작하여 세 부분으로 분석됩니다.

닐 포스트먼의 <죽도록 웃기다>는 이러한 변화의 문화적 영향을 강조합니다.

포스트맨과 맥루한은 커뮤니케이션 미디어가 사고를 형성하는 방식("미디어가 곧 메시지")을 강조합니다.

독서를 통해 길러진 '타이포그래피 마인드'는 장시간 집중력과 합리적 사고를 촉진합니다.

링컨-더글러스 토론과 케네디-닉슨 토론 비교하기

1858년 링컨-더글러스 토론은 그 길이와 형식 때문에 오랜 시간 집중해야 했습니다.

토론의 구조는 책 읽기 문화에서 흔히 볼 수 있는 길고 복잡한 문장을 반영했습니다.

1960년 텔레비전으로 방영된 케네디-닉슨 토론은 텔레비전의 형식에 맞춰 더 짧고 세분화된 토론으로 진행되었습니다.

닉슨의 주장보다는 텔레비전 방송에서 보여준 닉슨의 저조한 실력이 선거 결과에 영향을 미쳤습니다.

텔레비전은 짧은 정보 세그먼트의 소비를 촉진하고 내용보다 외모를 우선시했습니다.

인터넷이 집중력에 미치는 영향

인터넷과 끊임없는 알림은 집중력을 떨어뜨리는 원인이 됩니다.

니콜라스 카의 <더 쉘로우즈>는 인터넷이 사고에 미치는 영향을 탐구하며 이를 혼란스러운 것으로 묘사합니다.

웹사이트와 플랫폼은 지속적인 자극을 통해 사용자 참여를 유지하도록 설계되었습니다.

Carr는 뇌의 가소성과 지속적인 스크린 타임이 집중력에 미치는 부정적인 영향을 강조합니다.

기업들은 심리학적 기법과 디자인을 사용하여 사용자의 관심을 끌기 위해 적극적으로 경쟁합니다.

션 파커의 인용문은 온라인에서 보내는 시간을 극대화하기 위한 플랫폼의 의도적인 설계를 보여줍니다.

책에는 집중적인 관심이 필요하지만 인터넷 플랫폼은 이를 적극적으로 포착하려고 노력합니다.

자녀의 스크린 타임을 제한하는 기술 리더의 사례는 부정적인 영향에 대한 인식을 강조합니다.

해결책으로는 휴대폰 사용 최소화, 주의를 요하는 미디어 소비, 디지털 자극 줄이기 등이 있습니다.