Stolen Focus

[supergee]

I was born with ADHD. Now social media offer you the chance to have it too. [Guardian]

Added: I seem to have picked a really unreliable narrator, but I still suspect a lot of this was stolen from good sources.

Comments

[dewline]

Most of those of us not born that way and subsequently exposed to "social media" have been rewired to develop it, haven't we?

(I'm not sure that I wasn't born with these issues. Used to be that I could focus on illustration practice above all else for hours if allowed. But, noooo, parentally-imposed house chores...)

[arlie]

It's not just social media. I get multiple interruptions a day in the form of phone calls; business' idea of the best use of my time being to listen to recorded sales pitches. My managers demand I sit in a noise pit, to be available for interruption at all times, now while also catching covid. My phone beeps regularly, without clearly conveying why it demanded my attention.(I think I'm supposed to clear notifications whenever there's a new one, however banal, so I only have one new one to go with the beep, and can thus identify the latest. Or some such; there's no explanation of how the UI is supposed to work.)

[bibliofile]

Er, you might want to consider the source on that article.

[womzilla]

Good twitter thread here about how Johann Hari cherry-picks and misreports sources or just plain uses junk science to make his point.
https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/1479125910896975877

just for instance, "Moreover, the researchers concluded that the subjects adapted surprisingly well to these [distracting] circumstances. Some who were warned that the interruptions would come actually did BETTER in the test than those who sat there unbothered by extra instructions from the experimenters."

[supergee]

Post edited to admit error