Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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2023-05-26 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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Votey panel for span
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic is titled "Attention Spans Are Weird" and is divided into two panels showing the same person in two different situations.

In the left panel, labeled "Me, Browsing Social Media," the person looks at their phone and thinks: "This comic has more than 2 panels and I am not gonna slog through that." They're unwilling to spend even 30 seconds reading a slightly longer comic.

In the right panel, labeled "Me, Finding a New Podcast," the same person looks at their phone and thinks: "There's only 629 hours, do I really wanna get invested?" They're hesitant to start a podcast because it ONLY has 629 hours of content -- implying that's not enough.

The comic highlights the absurd inconsistency of modern attention spans. When browsing social media, people treat anything longer than a few seconds as an unbearable slog. But when they find a podcast or TV series they're interested in, they're disappointed if there ISN'T hundreds of hours of content to consume. The same person who won't read a 4-panel comic will happily listen to a podcast for 600+ hours.

This captures the difference between passive browsing mode (where any friction causes abandonment) and active engagement mode (where people crave depth and length). It's not really that attention spans have shortened -- it's that the threshold for capturing attention has become incredibly high, but once something crosses that threshold, people want as much of it as possible.

View History (1) Original Comic