It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
It used to be that reading books made you an intellectual. In the age of TikTok and shorts being able to watch a movie for 2 hours makes you an intellectual.
What if I watch a movie in 56 two minute clips while someone extrudes playdoh in the corner?
I watched a mother completely glued to her phone holding it 6 inches away from her face while her teen daughter was trying to talk to her.
The mother would not look away from her phone while she sort of tried to answer her.
Truely heartbreaking to watch.
Plus those shorts are out of order. So it’s gotta take more effort to piece the plot back together, right?
:)
Exactly. It’s like making every movie Tenet. I have to actively watch and piece together the plot.
Maybe this could even work better for non-chronological movies like Memento
lol. someone make this app please.
I’d posit that we just puritanically glorify anything perceived as difficult, regardless of the correlation with “intellect.” I’m fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
People with long attention spans can still focus on things that take very little focus, like short-form videos. But people with short attention spans have a hard time focusing on things like books, or even movies. So having a long attention span opens up more intellectual avenues for you, without restricting any.
Yes, there's always some puritan attitudes involved in how we talk about this. But I do feel that people who can't read a book because of attention issues are missing out on something.
Watching a 2 hour movie is perceived as difficult?
> I'm fine not having the same attention span as people who had to less stuff to do hundreds of years ago.
Maybe, if we're really generous, there's a reasonable version of this argument that you've failed to adequately communicate here... But it really seems like you're trying to say that a short attention span is a good sign of progress, or something?
I know HN and SV in general has a culty addiction to contrarianism, and it rarely elicits more than an eye roll from me. Framing a short attention span as anything other than a bad thing is wild to me, and I honestly don't know how to respond to something like that (or if my sarcasm detector is off). Do we need scientific studies to show that goldfish brain == bad?
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Have you seen how they watch movies in China? Collectively, with hundreds of real-time comments flying over the screen.
https://theonion.com/man-binge-watches-entire-movie-in-one-s...
Reading might not make you intellectual, but if you read because you thought it made you intellectual, it definitely made you insufferable.