This proposition is misconceptualized, and as such comes across as though written by someone who doesn't spend much time observing how young people of average intelligence and impulse control are affected by constant use of modern tech. It is confusing two different things using the term "attention span". On the one hand there is this concept of a kind of subconscious but 'rational' opportunity-cost calculator and bail-out-decision mental module. You start reading a book, and after a while you assess how much you are learning or being entertained or whatever, compare that expected level until completion to your sense of whether there would better ways to spend that time and how quick and easy it would be to find something better, and if so, feel a kind of gestalt pressure to dump it in favor of something else.
On the other hand there is a human capability of maintaining focus and concentration in a manner consistent with classical virtues and avoiding typical vices, with diligence and determination without getting distracted or giving up prematurely out of laziness or defeatist attitude, the strength of which is a combination of natural aptitudes but also dependent on willpower, social reinforcement, habitual exercise, exertion, practice, and training.
The first idea could be called, "ever higher attention opportunity cost". That's not the dopamine problem. The second could be called "attention span capacity atrophy" - and that's a problem, because there are plenty of times an individual would want to or benefit from exercising that capacity when useful, but which their temptations-marinated lifestyle discourages them from developing and maintaining.
In this way it is like making the ridiculous statement that if you aren't responding to the modern availability of cheap, plentiful, delicious calories and sedentary occupations by overeating, getting morbidly obese, and being unable to walk up three fights of stairs (like an increasing number of Americans), then you aren't properly or adequately adapting to modern circumstances.
That's a totally absurd way of thinking about it. Instead, we say that it is the common human impulse from our evolutionary programming to eat as much and exert as little physical effort as possible that is *mal-adaptive* in the current environment, not that the impulses are fine and the unhealthy behaviors stemming from those impulses are 'adaptive' to present circumstances.
The problem of vice tends to be a willfully blind spot in a lot of commentary influenced by libertarian leanings, which is reasonable in a way because none of the implications are pleasantly reconcilable with the typical prescriptions. But avoiding the issue leads to a lot of analysis just crashing on the rocks of actual human reality.
I have a small quibble with the notion that in the pre-television and radio era books and works of art were contemplated by people for a long time. I think a more accurate description would be “most people never saw works of art save public monuments, and most people who could read only had a Bible and maybe another book available. Most entertainment and culture was of the ephemeral variety.” In other words, people talked and gossiped, sang songs, watched cock fights and horse races, read the occasional pamphlet if they were of the sort and in the areas such things were handy, and generally did more actual socializing. Only the wealthy had access to enough books and art to keep themselves occupied for any amount of time with them.
Possibly a minor point, but “making your own fun” was far more important back in the day for most people because the notion of an entertainment industry is a fairly new one.
These are good points. I wonder whether the mindless dopamine scrolling just fills time that, in pre-television generations, was mostly used for basic life tasks (housework, wagework, child- and sibling-rearing, etc.). As these tasks became mechanized and/or outsourced, the resulting free time came to be replaced with radio, then television, then video games, then Instagram, etc. The counterfactual where the technological progress of modernity, but without social media, leads to a majority of people using their newfound free time to ponder Shakespeare doesn't strike me as a very realistic one. They'd probably find something equally mindless to do. (I include myself, for the most part, in this "they.") So I guess I would kind of side with Arnold here in that I don't think the trend toward entertainments requiring shorter attention spans are necessarily bad, but I would disagree with the implication that art appreciation has been substituted out in favor of social media. Social media is just one of a number of newfangled entertainments enabled by 20th+ century technology that have been filling our expanding free time.
(This is not a good/bad value judgment of social media itself, but I think I would suggest that to the extent dopamine culture is bad, it is largely not replacing activities that, if they had been undertaken instead, would have been correspondingly good.)
I think you are largely correct. The main two things that dopamine culture seems to have replaced that I would say were significantly better are:
1: Pointless socializing, in the sense of wandering over and seeing what your neighbor or friend is doing, or hanging out down at the barbershop or store or diner just to see who comes in and chat with them. That probably is good for humans over all, and keeps us from feeling quite so lonely.
2: Small scale crafts, home repairs, and hobbies, the little creating and maintaining things that make us feel a little better about being able to do things and solve problems, plus get us exploring new minor challenges. It seems to me like many people today are just amazed that people can do anything, let alone well, never being someone who makes things themselves.
I would be tempted to add in a third as "Just walking around to see what we can see" sort of things, but I am not sure that is better in a real sense other than maybe getting a little exercise.
Overall though, I think you are right that it has never really been the case that the majority of people had long attention spans for deep introspection and pondering. Most people like basic entertainment you don't need to think hard about but can just enjoy in an easy way. Hell, Shakespeare is a good example of that: most of his plays work on two very different levels, the funny/dramatic easy to digest level and a more "Damn... now that I think about it, that is some pretty damned serious insight" level. Which is exactly what makes them great: they are easy to enjoy but offer more the more you think about them. Probably only 20% of his original audience really got to that second level, however, while the rest just thought they were fun stories.
If you can get your wife to agree, reading the plays out loud to each other helps a lot. Doing it by yourself around other people just makes you feel like an ass, however :D
The link to Sacasas’s thoughtful and insightful piece was much appreciated. Found his thoughts on Pascal especially provocative. His conclusion seems on the mark and helpful:
“the ‘dopamine culture’ frame is too simplistic and tacitly encourages an impoverished view of human personhood. To reduce a discussion of this significance to the operations of dopamine already sets us off on the wrong path. We need a fuller account of our relationship with digital media as well as a richer story of human desire in order to see our way through the challenges we face.”
I too have enjoyed reading the Gioia brothers for many years, each of whom is, ironically perhaps, something of a dopamine merchant in their own way. Music is a dopamine stimulant (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-12135590 ) and over the years a high percentage of the few albums that I buy have been selected from Ted’s annual 100 best lists. And Dana has long fed an interest in and appreciation of poetry for which there appears to be an acknowledged role for dopamine in its neuro-chemical experience. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2023/09/dopamine-rush-guest-editors-discussion-fall-2023 ) People must choose for themselves where and how they get their dopamine stimulation, but they must at least be aware of their choices.
Yet, as Sacasas suggests, dopamine seeking behavior is not what defines us or is even a primary motivator. When Arnold Kling writes of grandchildren as winning the jackpot, I do not picture him with a grandchild in lap, tablet in hand, scrolling through social media posts together. Nor does one tend to imagine him in a conversation with a daughter, telling her “no, don’t bother coming over with the grandkids, just post some pics on facebook.” I may be hopelessly out of touch, but when I have a grandchild sitting in my lap, I generally am reading a book with them. And some of the great unexpected pleasures in my life have been when a bride at a wedding has said “I am so glad that you are here, I still remember you reading with me as a child” or when a niece or nephew reminds me of something that I read with them when they were a child. Who, knows, maybe in the future Tik Tok memories will provide grouchy old men similar rewards, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
No, when I think of anhedonia and dopamine, I tend to think of Camus who seems increasingly relevant all of these decades after reading him during high school and college years. What would Camus say about digital culture? I don’t know but “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning” seems to ring as true in in the digital age as it did previously: we each must choose where we go from that beginning for ourselves.
"the probability of the same item getting the attention of two different random individuals is very low....Where will it lead in terms of the distribution of cultural, economic, and political power?"
As content distribution shifted from 3 main TV networks to hundreds of cable channels to near-infinite Internet media, cultural power has shifted from that with mass appeal to that which appeals strongly to narrow but passionate niches, from the least offensive to the most people to the most attention grabbing to some niche segment. In a world of 3 major networks, content must appeal to 33% of the population just to be average. With 200 cable channels, 0.5% market share is average. With near-infinite Internet media, an above-average supplier might receive zero attention from almost everyone.
The shift of power away from plain vanilla mass appeal may be viewed as a type of concentration --- shifting power from "normal" people to conspiracists of various stripes, for example --- but mainly adds to cultural "volatility". Hence, the notion of items going "viral".
"In a world of 3 major networks, content must appeal to 33% of the population just to be average. With 200 cable channels, 0.5% market share is average."
That 0.5% is the arithmetic mean, but probably misleading to call it average. "With near-infinite internet media", viewership seems to have some sort of Pareto-distribution, with a small percentage of the content channels getting the lion's share of eyeballs, and most channels getting very little. I feel fairly sure that Taylor Swift gets a lot more than 0.5%.
Whatever are they going to do in those winky-knowing animated movies that rely so heavily on adults sharing a cultural heritage to supply ready references? So that the movies run on two tracks, for children and for adults?
What will they carpool karaoke?
Who will model tolerance and amity among different demographics, if there are few universally beloved celebrities and no more top 40?
These things don't actually bother me, but if America exports America - you kinda need to have a shared culture, I'd have thought.
"Gioia’s post is mostly a rant against dopamine culture, creating an “us vs. them” narrative, where “them” is the tech companies".
I am as anti-woke as they come but this “us vs. them” comfort blanket is, in my view, the worst aspect of so much of the Anti-woke, Anti crass Progressivism discourse on Substack (and no doubt elsewhere on social media). The illusion that some 'elite' (whether Tech or some other imagined conspiracy) is 'controlling' things is to wildly misread our 21st c. malaise.....whose most salient feature is - on the contrary - that it is out of control by anyone.
And, not paying attention can be a feature, not a bug.
I know very very little about any recent news events and don’t have any social media accounts. Does that make me a bad person? What am I missing that would somehow increase my knowledge or happiness, broadly defined?
Two items for comment: superabundance and shifting our attention away from the physical world.
The problem of overabundance in our world (Gurri’s article in The Free Press on this). Obviously applies to information as Arnold clearly lays out. But overabundance is an issue (at least in Western society) that stretches beyond information to material goods and services. I agree with Gurri it has far reaching ramifications that impact our behaviors and mental health (obesity as one example, higher education dysfunction another). With the surfeit of great writing on Substack, I’m unable to drink from the fire hose and purposely limit my online intake to writers like Arnold and a handful of others. For me there’s diminishing value in spreading my limited time in smaller doses across more info sources.
This leads to the other point about forsaking the physical world. Plenty has been written about screen time versus real world and how this shift is unhealthy and should be resisted. I do my best thinking while outside walking, preferably in a park or trail, and I also try to pay attention. See the snake on the trail? Highly recommend the dopamine from this source.
1) Re: "With Internet media, our attention span shrinks dramatically."
Counterpoints:
— One may devote sustained attention to a substantial number of blogposts (or short videos), each of which is brief. Indeed, deliberate attention is involved in agile selection and study (or consumption) of elements from the cornucopia of cultural production. For example, many people organize consumption of videos into playlists.
— Many people actively listen to long, analytical podcast interviews, with sustained attention.
— Many, many people devote quite sustained attention to multi-year entertainment series, such as "Game of Thrones," also between episodes. Some would say that Game of Thrones, at least in the first two seasons, is a major narrative work of art, on a par, say, with classic novels and theater.
Might Prof. Kling say?: Sometimes it's this way, sometimes it's that way.
2) Re: dopamine hits and addiction.
In the spirit of Thomas C. Schelling, one may draw a conceptual distinction between *addiction* and *captivation.* In addiction, one craves what is absent (the absent dopamine trigger). In captivation, one finds it hard to desist, when engaged in a behavior (maybe because of dopamine dynamics).
For example, if I understand correctly, opiate consumption often is addictive, video gaming often is captivating.
Some behaviors are both addictive and captivating. If I understand correctly, crack cocaine misuse conjoins the two phenomena.
Readers might adduce more accurate examples that illustrate the distinction between addiction and captivation.
It's an empirical question, whether misuse of digital media tends towards addiction, captivation, or a doubly insidious admixture of both.
It should be noted that the clever young(er) people have complained of the "enshittification" of the internet, finding its interest palling; we are now in the "enshittocene", etc.
The problem is it doesn't much matter what the clever people think.
I realize that economists take a professional oath to adopt a sanguine stance virtually at all times, but what this post, and Gioia's, describe - makes you wonder exactly who's going to take the trash out in future.
"Also, it is mathematically unlikely that we would want to spend only the same amount of time with media that we would have 25 years ago. If the ratio of experiences available on line to those available in the physical world has gone up more than a million-fold, we are bound to shift much of our attention from the physical world to the online world."
Not only am I dense, I am literal. One can split attention, taking out the trash while listening to music or perhaps a podcast. One could let the trash pile up, but there's a limit to that and since it doesn't take long "to take the trash out", I don't expect there will be an epidemic of not taking out the trash.
But being less literal ... there may well be a decline in standards of keeping a place clean. And isn't that a cliche: busy college students being slobs?
There may also be a shift to paying other people to do those physical things. When I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who used a "lawn service". People mowed their own grass, did their own pottering in the yard. Now every day I seem to see the power mowers and trimmers and blowers of the professionals, while the homeowners are inside doing something non-physical. Not coincidentally, many of the people doing the physical labor are immigrants, legal or otherwise, who will do that sort of work at lower wages than many natives.
As always, the fact that the same arguments against online media were made against typewriters, books, belief-systems etc. in the past makes me immediately sceptical of the sort of large claims made by e.g Gioia (whose Substack I love), Haidt, etc. How old a technology is bread, and I'm still struggling...
Indeed. Many novels (Conan Doyle, Dickens, Dumas Scott) were initially published as serials in magazines or newspapers, only later being printed as books.
This has a similar vibe to the opportunity cost explanation for the decline in birth rates. It's not positing some inexplicable change in "culture"--which we can then tut-tut at. Just people reacting to changed circumstances in fairly ordinary ways--which can then have extra-ordinary results.
This proposition is misconceptualized, and as such comes across as though written by someone who doesn't spend much time observing how young people of average intelligence and impulse control are affected by constant use of modern tech. It is confusing two different things using the term "attention span". On the one hand there is this concept of a kind of subconscious but 'rational' opportunity-cost calculator and bail-out-decision mental module. You start reading a book, and after a while you assess how much you are learning or being entertained or whatever, compare that expected level until completion to your sense of whether there would better ways to spend that time and how quick and easy it would be to find something better, and if so, feel a kind of gestalt pressure to dump it in favor of something else.
On the other hand there is a human capability of maintaining focus and concentration in a manner consistent with classical virtues and avoiding typical vices, with diligence and determination without getting distracted or giving up prematurely out of laziness or defeatist attitude, the strength of which is a combination of natural aptitudes but also dependent on willpower, social reinforcement, habitual exercise, exertion, practice, and training.
The first idea could be called, "ever higher attention opportunity cost". That's not the dopamine problem. The second could be called "attention span capacity atrophy" - and that's a problem, because there are plenty of times an individual would want to or benefit from exercising that capacity when useful, but which their temptations-marinated lifestyle discourages them from developing and maintaining.
In this way it is like making the ridiculous statement that if you aren't responding to the modern availability of cheap, plentiful, delicious calories and sedentary occupations by overeating, getting morbidly obese, and being unable to walk up three fights of stairs (like an increasing number of Americans), then you aren't properly or adequately adapting to modern circumstances.
That's a totally absurd way of thinking about it. Instead, we say that it is the common human impulse from our evolutionary programming to eat as much and exert as little physical effort as possible that is *mal-adaptive* in the current environment, not that the impulses are fine and the unhealthy behaviors stemming from those impulses are 'adaptive' to present circumstances.
The problem of vice tends to be a willfully blind spot in a lot of commentary influenced by libertarian leanings, which is reasonable in a way because none of the implications are pleasantly reconcilable with the typical prescriptions. But avoiding the issue leads to a lot of analysis just crashing on the rocks of actual human reality.
I have a small quibble with the notion that in the pre-television and radio era books and works of art were contemplated by people for a long time. I think a more accurate description would be “most people never saw works of art save public monuments, and most people who could read only had a Bible and maybe another book available. Most entertainment and culture was of the ephemeral variety.” In other words, people talked and gossiped, sang songs, watched cock fights and horse races, read the occasional pamphlet if they were of the sort and in the areas such things were handy, and generally did more actual socializing. Only the wealthy had access to enough books and art to keep themselves occupied for any amount of time with them.
Possibly a minor point, but “making your own fun” was far more important back in the day for most people because the notion of an entertainment industry is a fairly new one.
These are good points. I wonder whether the mindless dopamine scrolling just fills time that, in pre-television generations, was mostly used for basic life tasks (housework, wagework, child- and sibling-rearing, etc.). As these tasks became mechanized and/or outsourced, the resulting free time came to be replaced with radio, then television, then video games, then Instagram, etc. The counterfactual where the technological progress of modernity, but without social media, leads to a majority of people using their newfound free time to ponder Shakespeare doesn't strike me as a very realistic one. They'd probably find something equally mindless to do. (I include myself, for the most part, in this "they.") So I guess I would kind of side with Arnold here in that I don't think the trend toward entertainments requiring shorter attention spans are necessarily bad, but I would disagree with the implication that art appreciation has been substituted out in favor of social media. Social media is just one of a number of newfangled entertainments enabled by 20th+ century technology that have been filling our expanding free time.
(This is not a good/bad value judgment of social media itself, but I think I would suggest that to the extent dopamine culture is bad, it is largely not replacing activities that, if they had been undertaken instead, would have been correspondingly good.)
I think you are largely correct. The main two things that dopamine culture seems to have replaced that I would say were significantly better are:
1: Pointless socializing, in the sense of wandering over and seeing what your neighbor or friend is doing, or hanging out down at the barbershop or store or diner just to see who comes in and chat with them. That probably is good for humans over all, and keeps us from feeling quite so lonely.
2: Small scale crafts, home repairs, and hobbies, the little creating and maintaining things that make us feel a little better about being able to do things and solve problems, plus get us exploring new minor challenges. It seems to me like many people today are just amazed that people can do anything, let alone well, never being someone who makes things themselves.
I would be tempted to add in a third as "Just walking around to see what we can see" sort of things, but I am not sure that is better in a real sense other than maybe getting a little exercise.
Overall though, I think you are right that it has never really been the case that the majority of people had long attention spans for deep introspection and pondering. Most people like basic entertainment you don't need to think hard about but can just enjoy in an easy way. Hell, Shakespeare is a good example of that: most of his plays work on two very different levels, the funny/dramatic easy to digest level and a more "Damn... now that I think about it, that is some pretty damned serious insight" level. Which is exactly what makes them great: they are easy to enjoy but offer more the more you think about them. Probably only 20% of his original audience really got to that second level, however, while the rest just thought they were fun stories.
I think you're right about all of this.
Re: Shakespeare, I'm still on the level of translating his English into my own English. I'm on level .5, I guess you could say.
If you can get your wife to agree, reading the plays out loud to each other helps a lot. Doing it by yourself around other people just makes you feel like an ass, however :D
Even better if you can get her & others to take parts, treating it like the play it is.
I would also add that reading newspapers (and coffeehouses, where men read & discussed the news) are considered major drivers of the Enlightenment.
The link to Sacasas’s thoughtful and insightful piece was much appreciated. Found his thoughts on Pascal especially provocative. His conclusion seems on the mark and helpful:
“the ‘dopamine culture’ frame is too simplistic and tacitly encourages an impoverished view of human personhood. To reduce a discussion of this significance to the operations of dopamine already sets us off on the wrong path. We need a fuller account of our relationship with digital media as well as a richer story of human desire in order to see our way through the challenges we face.”
I too have enjoyed reading the Gioia brothers for many years, each of whom is, ironically perhaps, something of a dopamine merchant in their own way. Music is a dopamine stimulant (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-12135590 ) and over the years a high percentage of the few albums that I buy have been selected from Ted’s annual 100 best lists. And Dana has long fed an interest in and appreciation of poetry for which there appears to be an acknowledged role for dopamine in its neuro-chemical experience. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2023/09/dopamine-rush-guest-editors-discussion-fall-2023 ) People must choose for themselves where and how they get their dopamine stimulation, but they must at least be aware of their choices.
Yet, as Sacasas suggests, dopamine seeking behavior is not what defines us or is even a primary motivator. When Arnold Kling writes of grandchildren as winning the jackpot, I do not picture him with a grandchild in lap, tablet in hand, scrolling through social media posts together. Nor does one tend to imagine him in a conversation with a daughter, telling her “no, don’t bother coming over with the grandkids, just post some pics on facebook.” I may be hopelessly out of touch, but when I have a grandchild sitting in my lap, I generally am reading a book with them. And some of the great unexpected pleasures in my life have been when a bride at a wedding has said “I am so glad that you are here, I still remember you reading with me as a child” or when a niece or nephew reminds me of something that I read with them when they were a child. Who, knows, maybe in the future Tik Tok memories will provide grouchy old men similar rewards, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
No, when I think of anhedonia and dopamine, I tend to think of Camus who seems increasingly relevant all of these decades after reading him during high school and college years. What would Camus say about digital culture? I don’t know but “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning” seems to ring as true in in the digital age as it did previously: we each must choose where we go from that beginning for ourselves.
"the probability of the same item getting the attention of two different random individuals is very low....Where will it lead in terms of the distribution of cultural, economic, and political power?"
As content distribution shifted from 3 main TV networks to hundreds of cable channels to near-infinite Internet media, cultural power has shifted from that with mass appeal to that which appeals strongly to narrow but passionate niches, from the least offensive to the most people to the most attention grabbing to some niche segment. In a world of 3 major networks, content must appeal to 33% of the population just to be average. With 200 cable channels, 0.5% market share is average. With near-infinite Internet media, an above-average supplier might receive zero attention from almost everyone.
The shift of power away from plain vanilla mass appeal may be viewed as a type of concentration --- shifting power from "normal" people to conspiracists of various stripes, for example --- but mainly adds to cultural "volatility". Hence, the notion of items going "viral".
"In a world of 3 major networks, content must appeal to 33% of the population just to be average. With 200 cable channels, 0.5% market share is average."
That 0.5% is the arithmetic mean, but probably misleading to call it average. "With near-infinite internet media", viewership seems to have some sort of Pareto-distribution, with a small percentage of the content channels getting the lion's share of eyeballs, and most channels getting very little. I feel fairly sure that Taylor Swift gets a lot more than 0.5%.
Whatever are they going to do in those winky-knowing animated movies that rely so heavily on adults sharing a cultural heritage to supply ready references? So that the movies run on two tracks, for children and for adults?
What will they carpool karaoke?
Who will model tolerance and amity among different demographics, if there are few universally beloved celebrities and no more top 40?
These things don't actually bother me, but if America exports America - you kinda need to have a shared culture, I'd have thought.
"Gioia’s post is mostly a rant against dopamine culture, creating an “us vs. them” narrative, where “them” is the tech companies".
I am as anti-woke as they come but this “us vs. them” comfort blanket is, in my view, the worst aspect of so much of the Anti-woke, Anti crass Progressivism discourse on Substack (and no doubt elsewhere on social media). The illusion that some 'elite' (whether Tech or some other imagined conspiracy) is 'controlling' things is to wildly misread our 21st c. malaise.....whose most salient feature is - on the contrary - that it is out of control by anyone.
“then you’re not paying attention!”
And, not paying attention can be a feature, not a bug.
I know very very little about any recent news events and don’t have any social media accounts. Does that make me a bad person? What am I missing that would somehow increase my knowledge or happiness, broadly defined?
Isn't Substack "Social Media"?
I heart Kling since ~2007 so I make an exception. Not too complicated.
Yes, adhd is not a bug. Now can we stop catastrophizing it?
Two items for comment: superabundance and shifting our attention away from the physical world.
The problem of overabundance in our world (Gurri’s article in The Free Press on this). Obviously applies to information as Arnold clearly lays out. But overabundance is an issue (at least in Western society) that stretches beyond information to material goods and services. I agree with Gurri it has far reaching ramifications that impact our behaviors and mental health (obesity as one example, higher education dysfunction another). With the surfeit of great writing on Substack, I’m unable to drink from the fire hose and purposely limit my online intake to writers like Arnold and a handful of others. For me there’s diminishing value in spreading my limited time in smaller doses across more info sources.
This leads to the other point about forsaking the physical world. Plenty has been written about screen time versus real world and how this shift is unhealthy and should be resisted. I do my best thinking while outside walking, preferably in a park or trail, and I also try to pay attention. See the snake on the trail? Highly recommend the dopamine from this source.
1) Re: "With Internet media, our attention span shrinks dramatically."
Counterpoints:
— One may devote sustained attention to a substantial number of blogposts (or short videos), each of which is brief. Indeed, deliberate attention is involved in agile selection and study (or consumption) of elements from the cornucopia of cultural production. For example, many people organize consumption of videos into playlists.
— Many people actively listen to long, analytical podcast interviews, with sustained attention.
— Many, many people devote quite sustained attention to multi-year entertainment series, such as "Game of Thrones," also between episodes. Some would say that Game of Thrones, at least in the first two seasons, is a major narrative work of art, on a par, say, with classic novels and theater.
Might Prof. Kling say?: Sometimes it's this way, sometimes it's that way.
2) Re: dopamine hits and addiction.
In the spirit of Thomas C. Schelling, one may draw a conceptual distinction between *addiction* and *captivation.* In addiction, one craves what is absent (the absent dopamine trigger). In captivation, one finds it hard to desist, when engaged in a behavior (maybe because of dopamine dynamics).
For example, if I understand correctly, opiate consumption often is addictive, video gaming often is captivating.
Some behaviors are both addictive and captivating. If I understand correctly, crack cocaine misuse conjoins the two phenomena.
Readers might adduce more accurate examples that illustrate the distinction between addiction and captivation.
It's an empirical question, whether misuse of digital media tends towards addiction, captivation, or a doubly insidious admixture of both.
It should be noted that the clever young(er) people have complained of the "enshittification" of the internet, finding its interest palling; we are now in the "enshittocene", etc.
The problem is it doesn't much matter what the clever people think.
Noah Smith has a somewhat hopeful perspective about this.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-death-again-of-the-internet-as
Oh yes, I think that was linked here!
I realize that economists take a professional oath to adopt a sanguine stance virtually at all times, but what this post, and Gioia's, describe - makes you wonder exactly who's going to take the trash out in future.
I know that I'm dense, but I don't get the metaphor.
"Also, it is mathematically unlikely that we would want to spend only the same amount of time with media that we would have 25 years ago. If the ratio of experiences available on line to those available in the physical world has gone up more than a million-fold, we are bound to shift much of our attention from the physical world to the online world."
Not only am I dense, I am literal. One can split attention, taking out the trash while listening to music or perhaps a podcast. One could let the trash pile up, but there's a limit to that and since it doesn't take long "to take the trash out", I don't expect there will be an epidemic of not taking out the trash.
But being less literal ... there may well be a decline in standards of keeping a place clean. And isn't that a cliche: busy college students being slobs?
There may also be a shift to paying other people to do those physical things. When I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who used a "lawn service". People mowed their own grass, did their own pottering in the yard. Now every day I seem to see the power mowers and trimmers and blowers of the professionals, while the homeowners are inside doing something non-physical. Not coincidentally, many of the people doing the physical labor are immigrants, legal or otherwise, who will do that sort of work at lower wages than many natives.
As always, the fact that the same arguments against online media were made against typewriters, books, belief-systems etc. in the past makes me immediately sceptical of the sort of large claims made by e.g Gioia (whose Substack I love), Haidt, etc. How old a technology is bread, and I'm still struggling...
Also: Twitter account Pessimists Archive ftw!
" (Compare a 30-minute TV program to a novel.)"
I think this is a mistake. A novel is like binging a multi-season series or an episode like reading the novel in parts.
Indeed. Many novels (Conan Doyle, Dickens, Dumas Scott) were initially published as serials in magazines or newspapers, only later being printed as books.
This has a similar vibe to the opportunity cost explanation for the decline in birth rates. It's not positing some inexplicable change in "culture"--which we can then tut-tut at. Just people reacting to changed circumstances in fairly ordinary ways--which can then have extra-ordinary results.
Ted Gioia is increasingly pessimistic, and it makes his otherwise interesting writing hard to read.
The number one aphorism I retained from my now 70 year old mother in my youth was, "Patience is a virtue."