Is tl;dr making us dumber?

Image courtesy Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Let’s examine the evidence:

· Almost every thoughtful post we make on social media garners one or more comments of tl;dr.

· Modern media, online, print or TV is a plethora of sound bites. The headline and the five second quote are everything.

· Apart from esteemed publications and websites, every article must be broken down into a mere handful of paragraphs liberally sprinkled with photographs.

· Increasingly, social media sites are based around the concept of a couple of hundred characters or a 15-second video.

· According to many studies (e.g. Digital Information World) the human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to 8 seconds over the last 10 years. We’ve become goldfish!

· Concentration is almost impossible, with students regularly trying to study and complete homework while absorbing multiple media streams from their devices.

· Services have emerged to boil whole books down to a few takeaways.

For the uninitiated, tl;dr, or tl/dr, stands for “Too Long, didn’t read.”

I get it, the modern world, particularly since the arrival of smartphones, is a firehose of information bombarding us 24-hrs a day. Multiple times a minute, our minds are distracted by notification dings and beeps. Our…