[npilk]

Steven Johnson had an interesting take on this in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Bad_Is_Good_for_Y...

TL;DR - the complexity of media has been increasing over the past decades, which means that children spending time with digital media are benefiting from it relative to past generations.

As an example, playing a modern AAA video game is much more mentally stimulating than playing Pong. But also, watching an hour of a modern TV show, or even a modern reality show, is more challenging mentally than watching classic TV from the 60s and 70s—there are many, many more plots and relationship dynamics to track and speculate about.

[germinalphrase]

A counter argument (made by Alan Kay and others) is that the language complexity of what people read is reducing which is leading to a return to an oral culture rather than literate culture (to our collective detriment). My anecdotal experience as a high school English teacher leads me to say this feels true.

[npilk]

It’s been a while since I read the book, but I think Johnson had hypothesized that more modern reading experiences (e.g. browsing the Internet) might require more context switching and mental processing than traditional written formats like a newspaper. Granted, he wrote the book in 2005, but I do think memes and other internet-native forms of content are challenging in new and different ways.

[svnt]

Who are the others? I would like to read more about this.

[leonroy]

A few years back a comparitive analysis was made of past president's vocabularies and their grade level: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-fire-and-fury-smart-genius-ob...

Politics aside it does seem that presidents have been pitching their language lower and lower to appeal to a broader audience. I recall reading about how Obama simplified the vocabulary of his speeches from college level to 10th grade, to 4th grade to 2nd grade: https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2010/01/29/professor-obama... https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/01/27/keeping-it-simp...

On the flip side though George Washington's first inaugaral address goes to the other extreme where it's impenetrably verbose: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/have-pr...

Anecdata at this point but I fear the OP might be right - we are simplifying our language over time.

[asdff]

I wonder what Johnson thinks about the decline of reading going on in parallel to the rise of TV viewership? It's true that old shows or movies might have had simpler and more tidy plots (not all of them of course), but I think even the most complicated modern shows aren't nearly so complicated as a basic novel. Case in point, anything adapted from print to tv or film has a lot of plot left out because there simply isn't enough time to convey that information given the lower information density of these forms of media vs the printed page. Before serialized TV was also serialized stories that could have very complicated subplots and other things going on. Then you have the newspaper itself with all of its complicated real world subplots; a lot more content certainly than what the talking heads on CNN can cover even with 24 hour news.

It's interesting with the internet too, even though there should be a lot more stories in the zeitgeist at once given its wide reach, sometimes due to its virality, one storyline is able to dominate everything at once and suck the air out of the room. Did we really need a dozen article about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in everything from Reuters to The Atlantic for seemingly two whole days? If you only got news from twitter that might consume your entire feed. If you got your news from the newspaper, that would at most just consume one article or two out of many others of pages of printed material. It would also be limited to probably one section of the many different sections of the paper all covering different news topics.

[npilk]

Copying a comment from below - it’s been a while since I read the book, but I think Johnson had hypothesized that more modern reading experiences (e.g. browsing the Internet) might require more context switching and mental processing than traditional written formats like a newspaper. Granted, he wrote the book in 2005, but I do think memes and other internet-native forms of content are challenging in new and different ways.

[asdff]

I wonder if the additional processing affects fatigue at all?