7 November, 2025
Today, I wanted to share my thoughts a little bit about the modern Internet’s effects on a person’s attention span.
It appeared to me so many times for the past couple of years that I have been overusing my smartphone. With or without limiting apps, some dark magic (or more likely a psychological trick) is forcing me to indulge in the internet, starting a loop of endless procrastination. This is what people might call an internet addiction disorder. And it has become a norm.
Today’s societies has accepted this disorder already because everyone uses the internet on a daily basis. On a regular Bangkok train, if you don’t stare at your smartphones yourself, you may see at least 90-95% of people in your entire carriage staring at their phones. This may be a normal fact to us all, but we should all consider how detrimental this occurrence has become.
My internet addiction, on a self-conscious level, has made me pay attention to less of the details of things, but more about the quantity of content I want consume at that instant. From this, I think of short-form content that is booming right now: TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts, etc. These platforms could gather so much audience because all of their audience suffer this exact consequence and their action encourages the algorithm to bring more content!
Now think of the next generation, and their children. And now think of their children’s children. If this continues, maybe one day everyone on Earth would have extremely weakened memorization capabilities! I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a benefit from the direction we are heading.
A.I. is, again, slowly taking over our basic tasks and calculations. It will be slowly trained to solve more and more complex-level problems. Meanwhile we will use our brains less and less until we essentially revert back to our cave-man ancestors’ level of intelligence.
I’m not writing this to complain. I’m writing this to throw my concern into the sea of the Internet, hoping someone could catch on or relate. And maybe they will do something about it. Will you?