Hyper attention vs. Deep attention
So in the first lectorial for media one we had a read through an essay about hyper attention vs. deep attention. The concepts were quite simple and interesting to read about in detail. From my understanding, deep attention is when you focus on one thing for a period of time without distraction and hyper attention is focusing on many things at once. The essay suggests, that older generations are prone to deep attention and younger generations are prone to hyper attention. To some extent I do agree with this, older generations grew up in households and classrooms that endorsed deep attention where as younger generations have grown up with so much more technology in our lives hyper attention is a sensible result. I think Millennials may be the last generation capable of both hyper and deep attention as while our education systems place great emphasis on deep attention as a necessity for learning, we are also capable of focusing on so many things at once while still functioning effectively. As education systems, and society as a whole, moves more towards hyper attention as a social norm generations after the millennials will struggle to engage deep attention. At this point I don’t feel in the position to judge whether this is a good or a bad thing, as both have their merits, but it will be interesting to see this change without our lifetimes.