Hey! Can I get your attention for a minute?

  Howard Ho For those that want more
personal enlightening and sobering commentary please e-mail Ho, the
educational columnist, at palmtree@ucla.edu. Click Here for
more articles by Howard Ho

Hey you! Put down your joint! This is another edition of the
educational ““ yet unethical ““ column dedicated to
insightful ““ yet unoriginal ““ commentary on the
intellectual wasteland you no doubt inhabit. Back by unpopular
demand, the column now features new and improved segment titles.
Today’s topic is the disappearance of the modern attention
span.

And now for a segment I’d like to call “Statistics
and expert analyses that will scare you!” I am joined by Dave
Dufus Doe, the Nobel Prize-winning surfer and expert on
today’s era of soundbites. He notes that 35 percent of the
people reading this article were not a minute ago and that a minute
from now 65 percent more people will not be. Doe also presents
evidence that today’s soundbites are getting shorter and
shorter, creating shorter and shorter attention spans, which
contributes to the “¦ hey, didn’t I say put down the
chronic? It’s for your own good. Based on the evidence,
today’s quote of the day comes from Doe, who says
“Soundbites suck!”

And now for the segment where I present you with an analogy,
that wonderful literary device that you failed to do on the SAT.
Magazines are to novels as pop ditties are to albums as Hi-C is to
chardonnay. The loss of attention spans means that superficial
entities (magazines, pop ditties, Hi-C) will come to dominate the
media and our cups.

To expand, here is a sub-segment entitled, “Music and why
you don’t know jack about it!” Today’s pop song
is three to five minutes long and contains a single emotion,
usually juvenile and extreme. The fact that the lyrics might be
interesting doesn’t change the fact that the music itself
merely sticks with a single sound that gets pummeled into you ad
nausea infinitum ““ which in Latin means “Put down the
Buddha!”

You may wonder why there are no pop songs longer than five
minutes. The answer is simple: the songs only deal with one
emotion. After all, can you sit through movies where only happiness
is portrayed? Do you eat meals of only fruit? To answer these,
today’s official catchphrase is “Stop using rhetorical
questions!”

Real artists can create larger, longer works based on the
official artistic principle of the day, “contrast.”
Shakespeare follows seriousness with comic relief. Beethoven
follows musical violence with a catchy folk tune. Spielberg follows
a bloody opening scene with scenes in quiet fields. I could go on,
but I’ve already lost your attention.

The dwindling of attention spans means the loss of stories,
characters, narratives ““ anything that requires you to
remember something from the beginning to understand the end. That
is why people like spoilers: they don’t need to watch for two
hours in order to figure out that Bruce Willis is actually a ghost
or that Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are both Tyler Durden. That’s
why people love pop music: they don’t have to worry about the
music changing emotions in the middle of a make-out session.

And now for the virtue of the day, “Depth.” Though
this word can be used to describe you as a bottomless pit, I prefer
to have it mean “knowing a lot about a single
thing.”

For example, knowing that Karlheinz Stockhausen influenced the
Beatles’ music and appears on the “Sergeant
Peppers” album cover is slightly more in-depth than saying,
“Hey, didn’t that Harrison guy die or
something?”

And now I end with the segment I call, “Duh!”
Isn’t your attention span worth more than a lifetime of pot?
Aren’t you glad I’m here to keep you educated? In your
newfound genius, you now reply, “Stop using rhetorical
questions!”

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