I think people are paying attention to things for longer spans. You can lose hours to superficial content on tiktok or YouTube, but you can also fill hours of your days with lectures and podcasts and audiobooks. Everyone I know under the age of 70 has binged their favorite shows, watching 6 or more hourlong episodes in a sitting. Minecraft players can lose themselves for a day, easily, paying attention to the game for 12+ hours.<p>Look at the typical response of young people to TV ads - they find the rapid switching and interruptions infuriating. They'll have watched many hourlong episodes of their favorite show, maybe repeatedly, and be able to tell you the story in detail.<p>I don't think there's an attention span problem, there's a short-circuited attention problem that sucks people into wasting time on superficial content.<p>Less time reading isn't necessarily a bad thing if our lives are being enriched through other media. Not everything has to be deliberative study. There's a balance to be found between reading, silent contemplation, entertainment or educational audiovisual content, and so on. Going down a YouTube rabbit hole of superficial content is still paying attention, it's just not good for you.<p>I think there's a lot of subliminal conditioning of attention in people who engage with modern media, and it's easy to have your attention captured, but you can turn that around by being deliberate in your choice of a playlist, or selection of a playlist, and not allowing a third party the ability to choose content for you.