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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9545409" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I will assume a good control group was used. Kids with no screen time at all. But how accurate were the parent's assessments? Did the parents believe that the increased screen time would increase distractability and therefore rate it at an increased rate? I can assume that the researchers accounted for this, but you were quite specific that they were noting the parent's ratings, and no other measurements.Addiction does not mean decreased attention span. And correlation is famously not causation. Also, those results don't seem to be related to the questions they were asking. They were looking for productivity and ability to work within restraint and noted addiction tendencies?Ah, now here is something interesting. But... strange. My own viewing habits on Youtube tend towards 45 min long videos, and I'm a young adult to adult aged individual. And how long is your average twitch stream? Longer than 2 minutes I'd imagine. Most twitch stream videos I see are 1 to 5 hours long.Here is a question for you. What is the average length of a movie? There is a dartmouth article here: <a href="https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2023/10/trends-movies-are-longer" target="_blank">Trends: Despite Shorter Attention Spans, the Most Popular Movies are Getting Longer</a> which shows that movies are on average very slightly shorter (90 min to 85 min) but some of the most popular movies are getting LONGER. And let us say that needing that dopamine rush to check your phone means that you stop and check it oh every 20 minutes or so... do you have a tangent with friends while gaming? Maybe get distracted by an event that just happened. That is also being distracted and not focusing, and that hasn't increased in recent years.There is a lot of debate on even what it means to have a shorter attention span. Maybe you do glance away from a screen to look at something else every 4 seconds, but if you sit to play a video game you can do that for two hours easily. Most of us have to focus for work, and yet we aren't seeing massive falls in productivity, in fact, we are seeing the highest productivity ever. Sure, I don't have the studies memorized to back this up, but it seems to me that I've heard people saying this my entire life, and yet I've never experienced it. What I have experienced is people not wanting to waste their time. Most Tiktoks are swiped off of in the first half a second, not because we can't focus on them, but because you have ten minutes to yourself for the entire day, and you are NOT going to waste it on something you don't enjoy. I've felt that pressure, to cram as much enjoyment into one or two hours as I possibly can, and that is probably leading into at least some of these things like the average time on a website being 4 seconds. Not a lack of ability to focus.</blockquote>

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