Over the past few years, I would spend a lot of my time just watching and watching videos on my devices compared to doing other things with my life like wondering if I should run around in circles wildly, or to go on the swing set and jump off as a kid. My attention span would start to get whittled away little at a time. This would happen whenever I were to go on any type of device and watch youtube videos on it. Every time I went on one, the more my capacity to keep my attention present would degrade. I always felt like I have to be called hundreds of times until my mind finally gets back to the real world again. 

I know what I have been doing for quite a while now. I’ve been spending a lot of time just watching videos about airsoft and rc things and immersing myself in those types of videos for hours at a time. Now youtube is a great place for people to get things like entertainment, music, tutorials, and much more. Things that used to be done in person and take a while to look up can now be seen right in front of your eyes in just one quick search with hundreds of thousands of personalized results, just for you.

According to the professor of phycology at the Western Washington University, Ira Hyman, “With YouTube, you can easily find a video to teach you any activity. Complex physical actions are presented as a series of simple steps. Experts demonstrate the actions with ease.” (Ira Hyman). But...all of this can be harmful to people as well. This can expose people like kids and teenagers to tons of information and info that they can watch right in front of them. This can cause problems in the future which can also decrease their attention span along with youtube.

Youtube always seems to either be a center for great information, or it can be carrying away my ability to keep my attention span active at all times. At one point in my life, I once was an eagle, flying from activity to activity, always wondering what to do next. Now I’m just a teen that is sucking up information like a vacuum the way the videos on that very app feed that information to me. I used to look close and hard for answers. Now I put little to no effort into anything anymore.