Some things take time. You don't perfect a painting technique, explore a family of variations in a musical theme, analyze a complicated social issue, or solve non-trivial equations in a 25 second slice.
The students that I'm talking about-- they can ask their peer a question that they're interested in learning the answer to, and then have their attention wander and lose state in the time it takes their friend to finish chewing. This used to be pretty rare; now it's distressingly common.
I'm all for multi-modality and different ways to present information. But most people need to develop the skills to show up and think deeply for >20 minute spans.
the new delivery methods are not significantly better at delivering knowledge, but at diverting attention. They are engineered for that outcome, not for the information retention ability after a significant amount of time, or even for the comprehension of that information. So yes, as a result, the society is getting dumber, because our intellectual resources are rerouted to futile bits of nothingness.
Or it could be that academic study and modern knowledge work is just severaly outdated in their data delivery methods compared to contemporary techniques used in tools that "cause attention span issues" like Tiktok.
Maybe the UX of a traditional science paper has to be reviewed instead of trying to fault the end user for not torturing themselves trying to ingest something that has UX from half a century ago.
To me the issue seems pretty clear. We got new information delivery methods that are significantly better and when going back to old methods we naturally get unsatisfied. Does that mean we are getting "dumber" as "attention deficit" memes imply or that certain fields are just failing to catch up?
We can simply accept that ingesting old data types will be more difficult for the new generations or update them to match new expectations. Either way this sounds like whole lot of nothing for most of us.