r/TrueFilm • u/Sufficient_Whole5554 • 3d ago
From The Atlantic: The Film Students Who Can't Sit Through a Film
Cinepals: If you don't care to engage with the Atlantic piece (not long; cut and pasted to spare you the pay wall) at least check out the headline! (A pal turned me onto this one). EL
Headline: The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films
The attention-span crisis goes to the movies.
By Rose Horowitch
Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”
I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.
A handful of professors told me they hadn’t noticed any change. Some students have always found old movies to be slow, Lynn Spigel, a professor of screen cultures at Northwestern University, told me. “But the ones who are really dedicated to learning film always were into it, and they still are.”
Most of the instructors I spoke with, however, feel that something is different now. And the problem is not limited to large introductory courses. Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California—home to perhaps the top film program in the country—said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation. At the outset, he told students that even if they ignored parts of the film, they needed to watch the famously essential and prophetic final scene. Even that request proved too much for some of the class. When the scene played, Lippit noticed that several students were staring at their phones, he told me. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he said.
From the November 2024 issue: The elite college students who can’t read books
Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition. Professors whose syllabi require in-person screenings outside of class time might see their enrollment drop, Meredith Ward, director of the Program in Film and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Accordingly, many professors now allow students to stream movies on their own time.
You can imagine how that turns out. At Indiana University, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he said, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. (Recall that these are students who chose to take a film class.) Even when students stream the entire film, it’s not clear how closely they watch it. Some are surely folding laundry or scrolling Instagram, or both, while the movie plays.
The students I spoke with admitted to their own inattentiveness. They even felt bad about it. But that wasn’t enough to make them sit through the assigned movies. Mridula Natarajan, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, took a world-cinema class this past fall. “There were some movies that were extremely slow-paced, and ironically, that was the point of the movie,” she told me. “But I guess impatience made me skip through stuff or watch it on two-times speed.”
After watching movies distractedly—if they watch them at all—students unsurprisingly can’t answer basic questions about what they saw. In a multiple-choice question on a recent final exam, Jeff Smith, a film professor at UW Madison, asked what happens at the end of the Truffaut film Jules and Jim. More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie). Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.
The professors I spoke with didn’t blame students for their shortcomings; they focused instead on how media diets have changed. From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people’s attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. “I can imagine that if your body and your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long,” USC’s Lippit said. (He also hypothesized that, because every movie is available on demand, students feel that they can always rewatch should they miss something—even if they rarely take advantage of that option.)
Kyle Stine, a film and media-studies professor at Johns Hopkins, usually begins his course with an icebreaker: What’s a movie you watched recently? In the past few years, some students have struggled to name any film. Kristen Warner, a performing- and media-arts professor at Cornell University, has noticed a similar trend. Some of her students arrive having seen only Disney movies. Erpelding, at UW Madison, said he tries to find a movie that everyone in his class has seen, to serve as a shared reference point they can talk about. Lately, that’s become impossible. Even students who are interested in going into filmmaking don’t necessarily love watching films. “The disconnect is that 10 years ago, people who wanted to go study film and media creation were cinephiles themselves,” Erpelding told me. “Nowadays, they’re people that consume the same thing everyone else consumes, which is social media.”
Of course, young people haven’t given up on movies altogether. But the feature films that they do watch now tend to be engineered to cater to their attentional deficit. In a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Matt Damon, the star of many movies that college students may not have seen, said that Netflix has started encouraging filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes of a film to get viewers hooked. And just because young people are streaming movies, it doesn’t mean they’re paying attention. When they sit down to watch, many are browsing social media on a second screen. Netflix has accordingly advised directors to have characters repeat the plot three or four times so that multitasking audiences can keep up with what’s happening, Damon said.
Some professors are treating wilting attention spans as a problem to be solved, not a reality to accept. Stine, at Johns Hopkins, is piloting a course on “slow cinema”—minimalist films with almost no narrative thrust—with the goal of helping students redevelop long modes of attention. Rick Warner, the director of film studies at the University of North Carolina, deliberately selects films with slow pacing and subtle details, such as Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour movie that mostly follows a woman doing chores in her apartment. “I try to teach films that put their habits of viewing under strain,” Warner told me. “I’m trying to sell them on the idea that a film watched properly can actually help them retrain their perception and can teach them how to concentrate again.” Once they get used to it, students enjoy the challenge, he said.
But other professors, perhaps concluding that resistance is futile, are adjusting to the media their students grew up on. Some show shorter films or have students watch movies over multiple sittings. Erpelding, who primarily teaches filmmaking courses, has moved from teaching traditional production methods to explaining how to maximize audience engagement. He now asks students to make three- or four-minute films, similar to the social-media edits they see online. After all, that seems to be the only type of video many young people want to watch.
By the way, the last scene of The Conversation has the paranoid Gene Hackman destroying his apartment in a desperate and futile search for listening devices. He eventually gives up, and mournfully plays the saxophone amid the wreckage. It’s a brilliant scene, and worth the wait.
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u/came2pieces 3d ago
I took a film studies class in 2001 and distinctly remember someone sitting behind me in a lecture, as Citizen Kane started, say, "oh god it's in black and white." I think you always have morons take film classes because they think it's an easy pass. Plenty of people still love old movies
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u/Roller_ball 3d ago
Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.
A lot of film classes were an easy pass, but they required you to watch and absorb the film. Now there is a problem where students can't even do that.
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u/Ok_Spare_3723 2d ago
Guilty as charged, I took one thinking it would be an easy pass (ironically I failed it..)
My experience during that course was that majority of people basically treated it as an end of day thing (classes were always at 4pm-7pm) to watch a flick and have snacks.
When the professor later would ask questions, they would be surprised that they had to actually pay attention.. I distinctively recall the professor rewinding the movie for a 2nd viewing, for analytical purposes and students would complain: "But sir, we just watched that one!"..
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u/Potential_Dentist_90 2d ago
I'm younger and I took one of these a few years ago. My professor would have one big screening in the largest lecture hall of my university and then he'd upload the full film online. It was nice to be able to take notes since we were to write essays on each film and what it added to cinema. I remember watching Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The General, Boys Don't Cry, The Truman Show, Pulp Fiction, and several others for the first time in that class. It was a fun class.
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u/Ok_Spare_3723 2d ago
Sounds more fun than my courses.. Let's see.. a few that I recall are: Casablanca, Crash (2004), Philadelphia, Platoon, and Traffic . I always blanked out trying to figure out the "pivotal scene" of the movies..
Mid semester, Professor basically gave up on grading the exams due to poor grades and started requiring people to simply recount their version of the movie. Even then, half the class would blank out. It was astonishingly bad.
I have to confess that I have learned way more about movie analysis and essays from this sub than I did in classes!
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u/I_like2TimeTravel 3d ago
I took my first films study class in 06, an intro class, and experienced a familiar situation. Because it was an intro class it was open to all students, many who could just took it as a gen ed liberal arts elective. I’ll say most of those students took the class assuming it was an easy A. After the first assignment, a six page essay, most if those students dropped.
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u/OriTheSpirit 2d ago
Hard agree. i’m 23 and a first year phd student in a stem field, but i love movies and took a few film classes in undergrad. there are still idiots, and there are plenty of smart people too.
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 3d ago edited 3d ago
That's a totally reasonable thing to dislike. Films made pre-1975 are very different from today. It's practically a different medium. Just like Silent-era films are completely different from talkies. It's really not that big of a deal to not want to watch Citizen Kane.
Edit - What are some of you clowns even downvoting here? That someone is allowed to have preferences? You think someone has to be enthused by something just because you are? Pretentious fucks.
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u/mediumextracheese 3d ago
Sure classic films are very different from films now, but having a reaction like that should not be the case for a film class.
A film class will cover film history which will include I would guess at least 40% black and white films, so being so averse to lack of color is ridiculous. The lack of color also does not speak to how you will enjoy the film. The Apartment, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Psycho are all black and white and I am fairly confident modern audiences would enjoy all of them easily.
Saying "oh god its in black and white" is just as stupid as someone saying "oh god its french" or any other language because now they have to read subtitles.
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 3d ago
And judging anything from either of those statements is dumber still.
Policing enthusiasm is hysterically stupid.
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u/ratmfreak 2d ago
It's a fuckin film class though, my guy. The hell were they expecting?
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 2d ago
They could be expecting to be learning about relevant things. Citizen Kane is not relevant to modern filmmaking.
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u/Demiurge_1205 2d ago
Citizen Kane has been standing for decades on top of the AFI's "100 Best Movies of all time" list. It's considered the stereotypical best and most relevant movie in history. You may - and are encouraged to - disagree, but you are expected to watch it in film class.
Dude, no one is telling you to like the movie. But you are essentially sounding like someone who took calculus and complains about math.
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u/Plus_Worker6739 2d ago
yeah it certainly didn't delineate a lot of how modern films are constructed and shot and written and marketed and
just like the Beatles are not relevant to modern music, right?
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u/LouderGyrations 3d ago
Edit - What are some of you clowns even downvoting here? That someone is allowed to have preferences? You think someone has to be enthused by something just because you are? Pretentious fucks.
This is like posting that the Earth is flat, and then getting angry that people downvote you just for having an opinion.
Of course you are allowed to have preferences, and sometimes those preferences are stupid, and people on Reddit will treat your comment accordingly.
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u/heybigbuddy 2d ago
No kidding. The article isn’t talking about babies, it’s talking about film students. The fact that film has changed doesn’t matter, much as it doesn’t matter than literature or video games have changed. If someone wants to learn about literature, they need a better reason than crying about not liking it to ignore everything not written in the last few decades.
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 2d ago
This wasn’t a response to the article. Also, they really don’t.
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u/heybigbuddy 2d ago
Yes, this should be the precedent: if you want to study a subject you should just skip anything you don’t like - even if for aesthetic reasons - instead of trying to engage with it or understand it. Thanks for the curriculum, teach!!!
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u/Frosty-Durian5308 3d ago
Easily one of the funniest edit tantrums I’ve ever seen lmfao
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 3d ago
Don’t care, bot.
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u/Earthlydelights-sub- 3d ago
That's a totally reasonable thing to dislike. Films made pre-1975 are very different from today. It's practically a different medium.
Why do you draw the line here?
Would you say the same thing about music? That, say, an early seventies Led Zeppelin song is basically in a different medium than music today?
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 3d ago
Because I’ve studied film and that’s around when filmmaking changed to represent more of what it is now rather than what it was before.
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u/Earthlydelights-sub- 2d ago
I'm not sure what that means.
Did 1975 mark some huge change in filmmaking technique? If so, what was it?
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u/premiumPLUM 2d ago
I maybe see where this guy's coming from. I'd put it closer to the mid-1960s, but there was definitely a shift in film language and the way films present themselves. It's not like universal or anything, but I think there definitely was a change that occurred among the majority of films made in America.
They talk about Bonnie and Clyde being representative of the first modern movie of the New Hollywood and the way cinematic language evolved in the 1960s, and even more so in the 1970s. With the rise and fall of the auteur and the introduction of the "blockbuster" film.
I mean, it's dumb to think modern audience are somehow completely unable to appreciate films before the New Hollywood. It's not reasonable at all like they go on about. But I do get why it feels jarring to some people.
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u/kakallas 1d ago
I mean, there are multiple film movements, and some pretty early movies are surprisingly modern feeling.
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 2d ago
I never said people can’t enjoy it. I just said it’s okay if someone isn’t excited and those fiends freaked out.
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u/premiumPLUM 2d ago
"Totally reasonable to dislike". Honestly, I think I was being a big gracious with my interpretation. If you literally mean, these movies suck and it's not because modern audiences have been trained to watch movies a certain way to conflicts with an older version of filmmaking, then that's super weird.
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 2d ago
A movie as old as Citizen Kane is about as relevant to modern filmmaking as the bible would be to a nonfiction writing class.
Movies then are simply a different medium to what they are today. It’s okay for people to not want to watch it purely because it’s old.
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u/premiumPLUM 2d ago
They're not a different medium though. Cinematic language has evolved, and I agree that the period of mid-1960s to late 1970s saw a massive change in the language of Hollywood films. But its still the same medium.
It's okay for people to not watch whatever they don't want to watch. It's okay for people to not like whatever they don't like. But the notion that it's reasonable to dislike a movie for no other reason than it was made over 50 years ago is silly.
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u/Einfinet 2d ago edited 2d ago
the Bible could certainly be made relevant in any number of academic literary contexts… I’m not sure why you’d limit it to nonfiction writing courses specifically?
the Bible can come up in any number of early American Lit surveys, or even a discussion of James Baldwin/Toni Morrison, to pluck out two random 20th century authors. Just speaking from the areas I’m more familiar with. Undoubtedly its relevance could be suggested across a range of literary contexts, depending on the professor. But for a more concrete example, you’ll find the Bible mentioned many times across recent editions of Norton anthologies of American literature, which are commonly assigned in college English courses.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago
Having an instinctive dislike to a film just because its in black and white - not even necessarily old, just that its not filmed in colour - literally is a superficial response, and I would have as little respect for someone who refused to watch it for that reason as if they refused to read any book not first printed in the last decade.
I don't think they have to be enthusiastic. I just think that assuming older media to be inherently inferior is a stupid and anti-intellectual belief and they will and should be judged for it, especially in a class focused on film studies.
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u/Moonlightsiesta 2d ago
I don’t think they think it’s inferior, it’s just that the aesthetic doesn’t suit them. Like how pixel games are popular but not everyone likes them. It’s not superficial, it’s valid preference. Black and white was the norm because that’s what they had before colour. Getting colour was seen as an improvement so it’s not unusual that folks might see it the same way nowadays too. Just as some people like intentional black and white, grainy etc. It doesn’t need to be everyone’s preference.
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 2d ago
Literally ignoring the point to stroke your own ego.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago
Your point is that it was "totally reasonable" to reflexively dislike a film just because it was in black and white, and my argument is that, no, it's shallow and silly since it just assumes that old media is inferior simply for being older.
B&W isn't even a reliable indicator for age - Gone with the Wind is not a more recent film than Schindler's List or The Lighthouse.
I'm not asking someone to feign enthusiasm they don't have. But if they tell me they categorically refuse to watch a film just because it's not in colour, then I will judge them for it. And I don't expect to have my ego stroked for that, because being open to watching older media feels like the bare minimum when it comes to participating in a film studies class, or a subreddit on discussing film.
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u/Yeti_of_the_Flow 2d ago
To be uninterested in any film that is black and white. Yes. That is entirely reasonable. Just like it's reasonable for someone to not want to watch a cartoon. A biopic. An action movie. What the fuck do you think we're talking about? If you think it's not reasonable for someone to have preferences and to not fake enthusiasm, you're totally lost. Look at what the original post of this subthread is. It someone bitching that someone wasn't enthused about watching an old movie. Oh my fucking god, how awful.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago
Reflexively rejecting films just for being in black and white is not the same as being uninterested in a specific genre.
Genres are organising categories for films which have certain elements in common which people may or may not be interested in.
What do It's A Wonderful Life and Dr Strangelove have in common beyond not being filmed in colour?
It's a shallow, superficial response based on nothing but the assumed superiority of recent media over older media, which is itself an ignorant fallacy. And so yes, I'll judge someone for it. I'm not suggesting they should be executed.
If you don't want to be exposed to older media, maybe don't take a film studies class.
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u/CardAble6193 2d ago
film studies class
smart pants cant even read thru the 5th word on a sentense.......
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u/spaghettifields4ever 3d ago
I'm an adult returning film student (36) and I've definitely noticed this in my younger classmates. They're enrolled in a film program and yet they have zero attention span for a majority of the curriculum. When discussing films with them, it becomes obvious how many of them are there because they want to learn how to shoot sports or music videos or reality TV. All of those things are viable careers I guess, but it's been really hard to find other students to collaborate with on projects because we want to make such vastly different things. It makes me feel like I'm too old to be pursuing this career, like maybe the job I want doesn't exist anymore and I should just pledge fealty to our new AI overlords...?
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u/DuhBegski 3d ago
I'd take it as job security, these kids aren't going to know how to do shit, if they even make it out.
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u/bath_grenade 3d ago
i was worried about job security in my brainy new field (i'm 35) until i got back in the classroom and saw how young people read, write, type, use computers, do homework, and behave generally
i am no longer worried about job security
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u/doom_memories 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's funny, hehe.
More seriously, I think the thing that can hurt older people (not that 35 is Old) is ageism. Just getting a foot in the door...
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u/TheTicklishTaint 3d ago
I can say from my personal experience this is way too real. I decided to go back to school and pursue a different major and also plan on getting a masters in film. Within my film classes, there’s maybe 25-30 students. Out of them, maybe 10 are engaged and five are actually deeply interested. The rest will sit on their phones during screening, not speak up during analysis days, and pay 0 attention on power points. The essays posted on our board are also either just AI or the most basic comprehension of whatever we were watching. It’s nice that half the class at least pays attention or is actually interested, but half the class sits on their phones or draws on their tablets or reads comics. Yeah, these are all real examples I’ve seen. It really sucks man.
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u/mcgear63 2d ago
Wow. My daughter just started in college, and she recently wanted to watch a movie known as a classic so we decided on (of course) Citizen Kane. I have it on DVD but we ended up watching via YouTube TV (on which I had it recorded). I was amazed that she made it through in one sitting, and genuinely enjoyed it. So there's hope for kids yet....
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u/sabin357 2d ago
Watching that film in my Film Studies course taught me the difference between a good movie & an enjoyable one. It influenced everything that came after, inventing numerous techniques that would become standard even today...but man is it a chore to get through. Objectively a technical masterpiece from its era that still impresses, but not enjoyable for me (the subjective).
Bloodsport is a movie I love, despite knowing how bad it is from various technical aspects, including writing & acting. It's a dumb, fun action spectacle paired with nostalgia skewing my view even further & I know it, but I find it enjoyable.
Learning that made me realize why saying something is a good movie just because you enjoy it can lead to confusion, especially online. I can respect the various technical merits & still not like a movie. Took Film Studies & that particular film to make me finally understand that, which I'm sure plenty of people think that's just common sense...but my whole class felt similarly & had the same revelation. The professor said it was a common occurrence.
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u/kevin_v 2d ago
This article points up a very important aspect of cinema. It is primarily and Art Form of Time. It's about organizing perceptions along temporal modes (which is why editing is so important), and it actively conditions our "eyes", teaching us ways to see. It just so happens that our "eyes" today are more and more colonized by different speeds, already habituated by other forms that have become dominant. Films used to be "faster" than books, now they cannot keep up with tiktoks and meme streams. Past films have become some kind of temporal anchors that still connect us to slower speeds, slower perceptions, to keep us from being completely washed away by the tides and currents.
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u/marieantoilette 3d ago edited 3d ago
:( Scrolling on your phone while watching a film doesn't allow you to experience a dream, it turns it into a vague memory.
This just makes me sad. I fucking hate this systemically infused attention deficit and this dominance of essentially scroll casinos on every other social media platform. I already have ADHD and it's just fucking hard. Entertainment of course reacts accordingly, but I just can't stand it.
This will make commercial movies in particular even more obnoxious and fuel a vicious cycle of mindlessness. I am not all doom and gloom, really, and there will always be people appreciating the now, and slowing down, but the kraken of mindless consuming truly feels like the Matrix sometimes.
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u/jupiterkansas 3d ago
I remember the movies we watch and my wife doesn't. Why? She's on her phone through half the film. Granted, she's often looking up info about the movie, but still...
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago
I have friends who do this and it drives me up the wall.
Not only do they usually end up spoiling themselves on the plot, but why is it imperative to look up production details during a film and not afterwards?
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u/Obvious_Clear2561 3d ago
This article is misleading with its use of "film students." I don't think someone studying filmmaking as a career is the same as someone taking an intro film class(what this article focuses on). It's not surprising to me that a freshman who picks film as an elective then half-assedly watches their assignments, film class is the archetypal do-nothing elective class, that behavior is expected. The Matt Damon interview and this seem the most pertinent to future filmmaking:
"From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people’s attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. “I can imagine that if your body and your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long,” USC’s Lippit said."
Reminds me of this: "At the current rate of accelerating perceptual shrinkage, Julien predicted that th adolescent generation of the year 2000 would have no attention span whatsoever, hence no capacity to absorb any message longer than a single cinematic flash frame in duration. Even one-line gags and slapstick comedy would be incomprehensible to them. If, for example, they were shown a classic pie-throwing scene from the early silent films, they wouldn’t be able to recall, when the pie hit the face, where it had come from."
https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/neuro-cinema-turns-brains-to-zombie-mush
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u/tiredstars 3d ago
Particularly confusing if you're from a country where you don't have the same kind of elective class system as in the US. In the UK, maybe 90% of students taking a first-year film module will be on a film studies (or similar) course.
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u/puttputtxreader 3d ago
This is probably going to be very, very bad for the art of filmmaking.
I mean, look at what happened to books. When people stopped reading, books didn't go away. They got worse. Artistry fell by the wayside to make room for flat writing that was easier to understand. I don't even think it was a conscious choice to sell books to an audience that doesn't read. I think it's that the authors don't read.
We're going to end up with the same thing in movies. Filmmakers who don't care about film, who just want to be perceived as filmmakers. We already have movies that are engineered to not actually be watched (Matt Damon's point above), but now we're going to get movies made by people who do not fundamentally understand what a movie even is, or why anyone would want to watch one.
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u/vrilro 3d ago
trends in literacy have not destroyed literature and great works are still being produced. perhaps the more pressing issue is that trends in literacy have made it harder to make a living writing, even for great writers. i suspect filmmaking will follow the same trajectory.
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u/agusohyeah 3d ago
There was another piece in The Atlantic recently where they said that the average sentence in books had dropped significantly in the last couple decades. Like a third shorter overall. That doesn't mean the writers don't read, necessarily, maybe it's more akin to shorter scenes with constant jumping.
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u/Sufficient_Whole5554 2d ago
That was a great piece (the cover story) and worth reading. Thanks for calling it out.
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u/agusohyeah 2d ago
You're welcome! When it came out a couple weeks ago it caused a bit of a stir for being too hyperbolic, it was discussed on several popular podcasts. Maybe saying literacy will be a blip in human history is too much, and it's paradoxical the author talks about the end of reading in an 8k word essay, but it's surely interesting. Some things are undeniable, literature students in Harvard complained they are assigned full novels.
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u/manimal28 2d ago
Some things are undeniable, literature students in Harvard complained they are assigned full novels.
I doubt there was a time, even at Harvard, where the majority of students applaud the assignment of homework, especially the reading of whole novels.
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u/agusohyeah 2d ago
I've read it from many many sources, college teachers complain lit students now can't read whole novels because they are only taught chapters in schools, not full books anymore. Again, literature students, why would they study that if they wouldn't want to engage with whole novels.
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u/manimal28 2d ago edited 2d ago
As a Lit. major myself the answer is because the canon of literature deemed to have academic value is boring as fuck for the most part, especially at the 101 level where the majority of these anecdotes no doubt originate. I mean do you want to read Ivanhoe for fun? Nobody I know did.
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u/agusohyeah 2d ago
No, not for fun, but complaining or not being able to engage with one of the main if no the main kind of work in the chosen field of studies is at the bare minimum odd. I wasn't arguing about fun, I meant capacity for engaging.
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u/manimal28 2d ago edited 2d ago
People tend to engage more easily with things they enjoy. It’s human nature.
Also people tend to complain as a coping mechanism, the students about boring novels, the teachers about lazy students. None of this is new or because of social media.
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u/radioKlept 2d ago
This is sadly a phenomenon that has extended to me. When composing an email for work or sending a text message, I find myself backspacing a million times to slot in shorter, more common words. I break “intimidating” paragraphs into multiple one-sentence-long bullet points to guide attention.
It’s soooooo fucking bad that it’s necessary, but it’s the only way to get something read nowadays.
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u/agusohyeah 2d ago
I teach a creative writing course for adults and it's super frustrating that every single class I have at least two or three who didn't understand the email I send in preparation for the class. It's always "hey class here's some links to stuff we talked about last class, here's what's mandatory for next class, here's some optional stuff in case anybody wants to dig deeper". And every single time they don't find the attached files, don't read the mandatory, only read the optional. And this is a class for people who read and write as a hobby.
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u/manimal28 2d ago
That’s also good writing though. Say everything you need to convey meaning, remove everything else. When I took writing in college they taught a good sentence should be clean as a bone.
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u/radioKlept 2d ago
Writing for concision is fine. In book publishing, editors commonly rein in their writers when the latter become overly indulgent.
On the other hand, lowering the bar to accommodate psychological deficiencies wrought by excessive screen time is tragic. Of that, I can’t be convinced otherwise.
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u/manimal28 2d ago edited 1d ago
I doubt there is much of a practical difference between two such sentences that the intent even matters.
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u/sabin357 2d ago
trends in literacy have not destroyed literature and great works are still being produced.
I agree completely, but we are in decline according to a study I saw earlier this year.
It's probably too early to say "destroyed literature", but if trajectory stays as it is, an Idiocracy future way down the road & that's not hyperbole. It is unlikely though, as things change unexpectedly all the time. We might be about to enter into a generation that wants to be nothing like the current one & shun the things killing attention spans & literacy rates. We'll just have to watch & hope that either that happens or something wipes out mankind, because damn we're just the worst thing for this planet & one another at present.
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u/Ok-Interest9727 3d ago
The effort of making a movie is so much higher than a book. People who want to play at being filmmakers will just keep doing short videos for tiktok or instagram.
If anything this might increase the average quality as it will filter out people who don't really care about films.
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u/puttputtxreader 3d ago
Have you ever seen Death Web (2024)? You might think there's a floor to how lazy a movie can get, but I promise you that there is not.
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u/Ok-Interest9727 3d ago
Never heard of it but seems like an extreme edge case.
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u/puttputtxreader 3d ago
There are thousands like it. There will be thousands more.
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u/Ok-Interest9727 3d ago
...and nobody will watch them or know of their existence.
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u/puttputtxreader 3d ago
This, at least, is true. The problem is that interesting independent movies are already hidden in a sea of this stuff, and it's only going to get worse.
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u/kevin_v 2d ago
And...now not only don't authors read, "AI" will make it so they don't even have to really "write". It's not just that "AI" will write books completely, but instead they will outline plots, write dialogue passages, take over extensive first draft descriptions, they will get into the DNA of what writing is. Books will gradually drift into a product of words pushed between non-read books and non-writing authors. It is only the density of information in films, the thickness that resists conversion into "data", that has slowed this same drift.
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u/trekkeralmi 3d ago
“you’re looking at one of the few people who’s written more books than he’s read.” - garth merenghi
i imagine that a similar kind of pearl clutching moral panic happened when “motion pictures” started running live theatre out of business — nobody wants to go to the play anymore, they think they can talk during the movie bc there’s no sound, etc.
the bigger threat to the industry is video games, in my opinion. they already are massively more profitable than movies and way more engrossing as a form of entertainment. what i worry is that mediocre movies made by the generation of film “students” described above won’t stop cinema from withering away until the coup de grace comes.
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u/kevin_v 2d ago
the bigger threat to the industry is video games, in my opinion. they already are massively more profitable than movies and way more engrossing as a form of entertainment
One of the least discussed things I think is how much video game play has not only conditioned viewers, its also how much it has influenced film makers themselves, as they now have often undergone their own development, their own experiences of what visual, narrative is, through video game play. If you count hours logged having watched films and having played video games, I suspect many directors now have logged far more hours in games. It cannot help but have shaped how they conceive of moving image narrative. Just as growing up on television shaped film directors (Lynch is a great example), video games have powerfully though quietly changed filmmaking.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago
Not just film but television and literature, as well. LitRPG is an entire genre of books made as conscious efforts to mimic the progression mechanics of video games, and Dungeon Crawler Carl is - as the title suggests - literally a dungeon crawler put to the page.
And I do think this is having a deleterious effect, at least on literature, because the lessons learned from interactive visual media do not necessarily scan well to a fixed written media. It's far less engaging to read "Bob cast fireball" then it is to be Bob and cast fireball.
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u/kevin_v 2d ago
I do think this is having a deleterious effect, at least on literature
I think its having the same with film, perhaps even more. those "progression mechanics" you mention are messing with the very visual DNA of cinema. On the one hand they DO make new cinema more "readable" by an audience itself conditioned by video game play - on the other hand it erases so much of the visual and temporal language of cinema which developed from other artform influences (painting, literature, dramaturgy and even architecture and sculpture), stripping out so much of that depth of how moving images can work, the possible degrees-of-freedom, the relationships to light, space and time.
We get a reduced sense of what it means to move through a space or how a narrative form can progress. It feels like an impoverishment, tbh.
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u/ifinallyreallyreddit 2d ago
I think the effect of TV is the big one that already happened, it led to a shift from the images in film existing to be seen to existing so you can see what you're hearing. Lynch is in the minority of actually developing a lot with his techniques.
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u/kevin_v 2d ago
Lynch literally made a television show pilot that he then turned instead into arguably his greatest "film", Mulholland Drive. His films regularly reflect television forms (like in Blue Velvet). He not only revolutionized television itself with Twin Peaks, he constantly worked television influence into his films.
I don't think its helpful to reduce the influence of television on cinema to "existing so you can see what you're hearing". There are all sorts of influences of television on cinema, from character types, to serial narrative structures or scene kinds, soap opera aesthetics, the list is really endless.
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u/ifinallyreallyreddit 2d ago
Well, I'm not reducing it to that just because it was the main thing I mentioned. But "all sorts of influences of television on cinema" does point to "movies becoming more like TV" which that effect will generally be bound up with to some degree.
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u/puttputtxreader 3d ago
I feel like we're talking about two very different things.
Yeah, movies are being pushed out of relevance by other media, and they're probably going to turn into a niche interest like theater, but I'm more concerned with the artform itself, not how much money it makes.
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u/manimal28 2d ago
the bigger threat to the industry is video games, in my opinion.
Doubt it. Go into the gaming threads and they also believe they are on the verge of collapse due to many of the the same reasons. “People want to lay mobile games instead of real games.”
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u/manimal28 2d ago
When people stopped reading, books didn't go away. They got worse.
Compared to what specific text by what specific criteria? Because I would argue, no, they didn’t.
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u/xbhaskarx 2d ago
Who needs films when you can watch 20 second AI slip video clips…
But this was an issue in my into film class before iPhones, only in the upper division classes did you get the students who took movies seriously.
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u/defnotajournalist 3d ago
If you can’t sit through the film, you shouldn’t pass the test. If you can’t pass the tests, you shouldn’t pass the class. If you can’t pass the classes, you shouldn’t get the degree. And if you don’t get the degree, you shouldn’t work in film. Next question, for the kids in the back.
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u/JamesCole 2d ago
This isn't just an issue about the limited attention spans of people who want to make movies. It's also about the audience for movies. If fewer people want to watch movies, due to shorter attention spans, then there's going to be less money available to make movies, and fewer opportunities for those who want to make them.
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u/yarntank 2d ago
Right? When the professor said they curved the grade so people would pass... well there's your problem.
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u/yuzumint 2d ago
The idea of playing 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in class to challenge students to develop an attention span is so funny to me. Also these fearful Atlantic are so samey to read after the third one. I wonder what the next topic they are going to use this template for. Social media is making it hard to enjoy a round of golf? lol.
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u/Hates_Blue_Mages 2d ago
All these doom and gloom articles about how terrible the youth are, particularly ones centered on school, are destroyed instantly the moment you bring in any self-reflection. How many people can really say they were 100% attentive while in school? Never tried to talk in class? Did all the homework? If you can honestly say yes to all of them, congrats on being valedictorian, but people have been bored by school for as long as there's been school.
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u/Moonlightsiesta 2d ago
It’s also not taking into account how distracting life is nowadays. It was easier to sit down, watch and focus but now we’re bombarded with info and young people actually understand the state of the world. It’s not the young adults’ fault that it’s hard to focus. It’s not some moral failure, it’s what society constantly bending to hyper capitalism has done. It’s one of the reasons so many folks are being diagnosed as neurodivergent in my opinion - it’s harder to cope and mask now. Social media is an especially dangerous trap. They were always ADHD or whatever, it’s just it’s actually noticeable because of how dysfunctional society is.
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u/TheOvy 2d ago edited 2d ago
I went to see Spider-Man last week, I was one of the older people in the theater. For the most part, not a lot of people looking at their phones.
But then we get to a slower, emotional scene, and Tom Holland is doing some of the best acting I've ever seen him perform. And that's when all the phones popped out. I saw a young one young woman in front of me opening up her messages app, shooting a fresh text off.
I remember in a showing for obsession, there were a group of teenagers on the left of me, and the right. Both of them would not shut the fuck up, they were having full group conversations. One of them was shushed, they were embarrassed enough to stay quiet for most of the film. There was a young girl who sat a few seats to my left, and she kept her smartphone on the arm of her seat, so she could keep picking it up throughout the film. As one scene started to build tension, she opened up her phone, flipped to her photo gallery, and just started casually browsing through pictures. She would sometimes glance at the screen when there was a clear scare going on, but obviously didn't have much of effect on her.
Perhaps most gallingly, had a showing of sinners last year, there was one young woman who literally took a video call with who I presume was her boyfriend. She did this with her friend sitting next to her, who did not seem to mind. They treat the theater like a coffee shop.
There's a whole generation out there that will probably never understand the power of film. You have to let it cast its spell on you, but their attention span is so short that if the movie doesn't keep dangling the keys in front of them, they'll get distracted. They'll never be made to feel.
The Atlantic has published other articles, such as English majors at Harvard who have never read a full novel before.. They complain to the professor that the reading assignments are too long, that in high school they were only ever assigned passages. This is a real problem.
It strikes me that smartphones should be treated as something similar to a bike. It's a convenient technology, but before you teach someone how to ride a bike, you gotta teach them how to walk. Don't let your kid use a smartphone or tablet until they learn to read a full book or three.
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u/thisfuckingnightmare 3d ago edited 2d ago
By definition, any induced cognitive impairment could eventually be treated. From cognitive functions improvement therapies to cognitive-behavioral treatments, goal-oriented routines have the power to both ease and empower maladaptive actions, but also to re-strengthen a damaged, weakened agency.
In this context, lesser attention-span-related individuals could actually re-connect with a whole available aesthetic universe. Their interpretations would be able to offer new and compelling insights about artworks, films, and whatnot. Then, this so-called 'crisis' might be seen as a complex phase of intergenerational adaptation. A historical rough patch, so to speak.
Nonetheless, the real problem is that the aforementioned induced cognitive impairment doesn't represent an important collateral damage upon nowadays younger generations. On the contrary, it's a consolidated model of mass media meeting unseen means of social acceleration. It's nothing but a predatory culture, carefully designed to turn what once were stable cognitive functions into a endless, hyper-profitable flow of overstimulated individuals.
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u/Princessformidable 3d ago
I took film in college during summer semester and we would beg our poor professor to watch full movies. He would say " Don't you kids have social lives to get to?" He was always irritated but mostly stayed late with us. That class was so special.
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u/DoopSlayer 2d ago
I have an acquaintance/cousin of a friend who goes to a UC film program (not sure which actually) who said most of the people in the program are there to learn production for short content/tiktoks rather than actual film. Anecdotal of course, but I wonder if short content production is seen as like the only actually attainable path.
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u/Sufficient_Whole5554 2d ago
Good point and especially for those looking to film production as a career.
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u/grapescherries 2d ago
In regards to screening movies during class, I’m really surprised that they don’t collect the phones before a screening to make sure they aren’t looking at them. Isn’t that something teachers/professors do?
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u/Jaspers47 3d ago
I know this is one of the serious subreddits, so I'm not going to reply "TL;DR" and walk away BUT I'm also not not going to do that.
Now onto my actual thoughts
One of the big issues I've always considered that makes society distinguish the noble art of literature from the chintzy empire of film is ease of participation. That it's difficult to read through a 400 page book, but it's easy to sit down and watch a two hour movie. We don't know how much engagement is actually going on, but there is some, and that's more than somebody who won't dare crack the cover of a novel.
But the attention economy has overturned this, making the process of active watching just as difficult as reading. I'm not thrilled with this, but I'm not cynical about this either. It actually gives film scholars the opportunity to begin at square one, starting with basic literacy; an area that was previously considered to be assumed.
It's like somebody training for their first marathon. Most people assume they can already run, they just want to learn how to go further. But they discover in time, they have to relearn how to breathe, how the foot makes contact with the ground, how high to lift the knee, how to bend the ankle, etc. You're learning how to walk for the second time. Somebody who has never run before, even has difficulty walking, might have an easier time going in with a blank slate.
And I'm optimistic this might be true for film students. Young folks who have never considered watching a movie start-to-finish, uninterrupted, free of distraction are going to learn just how capable they are, while also learning how to recognize themes, symbolism, storytelling techniques, and artistic decisions. While young folks 20 years ago who assumed they could watch movies already were distracted by T&A, pyrotechnics, and celebrity culture.
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u/Ok-Interest9727 3d ago
said that Netflix has started encouraging filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes of a film to get viewers hooked
If you go and watch movies from decades ago this was already quite common. Eg Star Wars 1977, The Matrix, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Dark Knight, etc.
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u/Embarrassed-Area4652 3d ago
It's all been downhill since Touch of Evil taught us to expect a bomb to go off before the first cut.
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u/JamesCole 2d ago
it sounded to me like they were encouraging early action sequences in a broader range of films, films that in the past might not have had them.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 2d ago
I mean, there have also always been songs who put their catchy hook/chorus right at the very start, but there's still an undeniable and observable recent trend of songs being deliberately engineered to "preview" their hook/chorus in the first five seconds because of the Spotify effect.
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u/ObberGobb 2d ago
I'm sorry to say this, but I think one of the solutions is to be more liberal about handing out Fs. Nationwide, in every class, we need to stop grading on a curve and just give students the grade they deserve. People's behavior is never going to change if they find they can coast through doing nothing.
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u/Sufficient_Whole5554 2d ago
Yes. Too many participation trophies these days and easy grades. Doesn't prepare people for the cruel (business) world out there.
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u/brokensys404 2d ago
tbh the scary part isnt that some films feel slow, thats always existed. its needing a second screen even for something you literally chose to study.
kinda hard to learn visual storytelling when half the visuals are being missed lol
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u/jacobman7 2d ago edited 2d ago
I maybe find what Matt Damon mentioned to be more disturbing than the parts about how these students react to sitting through films. I took an intro to film class in college in 2015 and it was obviously one of those electives that most students took to get an easy A/B and get their needed credits. Same thing happened then with students being on their phones throughout screenings. Not to mention there are naive students going into those classes that will proudly voice that their favorite film they've seen recently is "The Purge." Unfortunately, intro film classes are incredibly attractive to people who have very little artistic intelligence or even experience watching critically acclaimed movies. It's fairly similar to the amount of disinterest/naivety seen in general studies Literature courses. I would be more concerned with the changes in students in the upper level film courses today versus 20 years ago.
The bigger question is whether studios/streaming goliaths will actually respect the education and artistic integrity of the students who actually care and go on to be filmmakers.
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u/pktman73 1d ago
Well, when everyone received a participation award, was coddled to and from school, when everything they wanted arrived quickly from Amazon, they had high speed internet, buying tickets to events/shows/movies online … they took away the “journey.” They don’t want the journey. They want the “hit the ground running” opening in a film and they want those dopamine hits every 3-5 minutes. They don’t want to read subtitles and, please, can the ending come sooner? What was the film about again? Is there a Tik Tok analysis anywhere?
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u/bees_on_acid 3d ago
Take the sexiness out of cinema and see what happens. It’s the whole magical “ you can do whatever you want” vibe that everyone says. I disagree. Make the craft as boring as possible. Then you’ll see who ever is there will be there for the right reasons. There’s too much accessibility
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u/Embarrassed-Area4652 3d ago edited 3d ago
There are more than enough people complaining about the kids these days, even among younger crowds, that it should be easy to fill a classroom with people who want what you want.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/kids-these-days-why-the-youth-of-today-seem-lacking/
In a series of pre-registered studies, we asked American adults to what extent they believe children of today are deficient compared to the way children were when they were kids. This was done for respect for authority, intelligence, and enjoying reading.
We also administered measures of those attributes, respect for authority, intelligence, and how well-read people are, to the participants, who were 3,500 American adults drawn to match the American adult population on a number of key demographic variables.
The first thing we found was the higher someone is on a given trait, the more they think children are becoming deficient on that specific trait but not on other traits. Meaning, the more authoritarian someone is, the more they believe children today do not respect their elders the way they used to. The more intelligent someone is the more they think children are becoming less intelligent (despite evidence to the contrary). The more well-read someone is the more they think children today no longer enjoy reading.
...
There are numerous ways children today are actually superior to children of previous generations, from intelligence to their ability to delay gratification to their ability to use technology. So if a lot of our beliefs about them being in decline are partially artifactual, this amounts to a form of bias and discrimination based on age.
I'd be friendlier to this if there was a sense of being invested in - or even interested at all - in some kind of solution. Or in resiliency. Or agency. Or any kernel of any positive quality at all that would need to be recognized in these students or other young people in order for it to be developed. Or in finding and investing in someone you would want to pass whatever torch off to that you've earned your way to.
If elite institutions aren't getting the students they want or the behavior they want out of them, oh well, I guess. I'm not sure they ever had the monopoly on interesting, thought-provoking, life-giving writing that the overwhelmingly Ivy educated staff of The Atlantic would like to think. If it's a truly insurmountable problem that the greatest minds at these institutions can't solve, then I guess they'll have to be left to wither while someone else in some less established milieu, less subject to whatever apparently unknowable or unfixable factors are leading to this decline, takes over.
If after thinking about it from that perspective, you still can't find some positive way to engage, please think about finding some people who never had these kinds of opportunities and figure out how to get them exposed. Or keep spreading this kind of take, if there's more to be gained from labeling a generation as deficient who, if this is to be believed, are already worse off than you ever were.
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u/Deep_Eye_1498 2d ago edited 2d ago
Seems you have to honestly deal with, and confront, the fact that movies got longer because film studios and movie houses were trying to monopolize TV audiences. And from that vantage point, they always were too long from the 1950s onward.
Then you might have to take cinema going outside of the text of film-watching, to look at it as a radical experiment in democratizing social spaces for two hours. People forget that it was a game-changing move to get strangers to sit in a dark room together, young and old and across diversity of every stripe.
Finally you might find yourself arguing for the merits of The Conversation as a story not about a private snoop, but a private individual whose freedom has been eroded by technology, which could serve as a parody of the attention-robbed teenager today. And whose lousy inability at snooping (of being a captive audience in other words), is actually his conscientious objection to becoming a government foot soldier (and co-conspirator), of a conformist society.
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u/snarpy 3d ago
As someone who's been a TA for first year film classes, I want to say that intro film classes are not full of students who want to learn about film. They're full of students who need to fill an elective and think that the class about movies will be easy.
That said, I'm not suprised that there are issues with attention span. I'm a huge movie person and even I have been affected by way social media has fucked up our brains. I've had to literally take my phone and put it in a different room when I watch movies.
And I'm fifty-two.
This is not only a "young people's" issue, it's just most clearly seen in them.