Bombs don’t require translation. I think the importance of non-English-speaking markets to the financial success of “big budget” movies is as relevant here as any purported decline in attention span.
As a counter example, consider the rise of “long form” television.
Again with time.
What about depth ?
A graph has a X and a Y.
Art’s recent tangent is to remove the Y (depth) so you can X (time) easier.
Else, in my opinion, it currently wouldn’t work.
Which is ironical, since this is how it came to develop, and will perpetuate itself.
(Else, no. I am not saying someone should make martyrs of whatever brain cells he/she still has functional after a demanding work shift.)
Motive. The whole of the difference is there.
Aside a great paycheck, the average of people don’t care so much art-wise about quality, so long as they get whatever they get now, quick, now now.
I think quite a few viewers and critics would argue that the best of long form television has quite a bit of depth, in part because it plays out over an extended arc.
As a writer, I would argue that you have to have depth to keep people watching (or reading) for an extended period, especially if you’re in a genre (or have a budget) that doesn’t support endless explosions.
Hasn’t that always been true, though?
Well yes, that’s exactly my point. Saying that people choose not to consume demanding media is different from arguing that their attention span is so short that they can’t.
All one has to do is compare the quality of the writing of popular authors from a hundred or two hundred years ago with today’s.
My opinion is that the average people have been fed easy no-depth writing for so long that they probably couldn’t read and understand anything else anymore.
Explain the disappearance of “;” and “; -” any other way then by the fact that the difference between ; and . was somewhat lost on a general scale. (?)
To say that not having sentences of different hierarchical level anymore didn’t affect the content would be well… almost blasphemous imo.
I think there’s quite a bit of selection bias there. Most of the “popular authors” of 1822 or 1922 have been deservedly forgotten. There’ve also been very dramatic changes in access to media, both from the publishing and the audience side.
And then there’s the whole question of how one defines “quality.” Complex sentence structure and flamboyant use of virtuoso vocabulary can obscure as easily as they elucidate.
So did a lot from last year…
Not sure they were that popular then, tho.
Sturgeon’s Law applies universally.
Compare the top 10% that remained from a hundred years ago with the best-sellers from last year…
Who today can (and want to) read the old stuff ?
Certainly not today’s average reader.
. . . . . . .
This is incendiary.
Perhaps we should leave it at that.
I’ll just wrap my case by saying that with today’s trend to avoid commas and punctuation as much as possible, perhaps the reading got easier, lighter, faster, less focus demanding and more consumer-friendly, but the musicality of written language got consequently lost (hung, decapitated and then thrown to the masses for further stabbing) ; – and that is sad.
The unwillingness to sit through a lot of filler material (regardless of the medium) when there’s an almost unlimited supply of easily accessible spoken, written, sung, drawn, animated, acted or blown up words — makes a lot of sense, actually. I’d argue people actually crave for depth and meaning and rightfully get impatient with all the crap they get instead.
I dont know…
How the old stuff feels to me:
Beautiful and young she sat at the beach, happy in her heart, above her seagulls hovering in the wind, as she waited for Paul to be back.
VS.
How the “modern” stuff feels to me:
Paul was late. But, happy still, she sat in the sand and waited for him.
. . . . . . . .
If that means what I think it means, then I can only agree. 
Are you arguing that Faulkner was a better writer than Hemingway because his sentences were longer?
While some people do claim that Finnegan’s Wake is the greatest work ever written in English, it’s never been embraced by “average readers.”
Most people know what sitting on a beach looks and sounds like, today; seagulls included — even if they’ve never seen one or been there themselves. Thanks (or “unthanks”?) to visual media.
Are you comparing the critically recognized “best” or the financially most successful? There’s never been a strong correlation between the two.
Out of context, the comparison is meaningless. The first could belong to a throwaway romance, and the second to a deep, book-length meditation on love and loss.
I am most certainly not. → (I am aware that this is not how it “works”.)
Add to that that I have read neither. (Probably out of reach for me, as I am French-speaking.)
But what can I say? If my first example with the girl on the beach (unperfect - likely very unperfect) is intended to be musical, the second sounds to me like someone dropped his drumset in the staircase.
Drumsets have their place, in both music and literature.
Editorial rewrite:
Paul was late. But, happy still [No one cares], she sat [What else she’d do??] in the sand [Obvious. She’s on a beach, duh] and waited for him.
Paul was late. She waited for him. → (God I was tempted to use ; here…)
Oups…
Paul was late. She waited for him.
I think I understand now… turns out perhaps I’ll be productive after all ?!
Just wrote a new novel:
That day, they met.
It was love at first sight.
– The End –
KDP, here I come!!!
Proust vs. Flaubert, then.
Apples and oranges.
Unless you want to qualify Proust’s as “novels”… ?
That alone could be debatable.
Otherwise, no; I am not gonna pick one over the other.
But tell me more than 5% of today’s readers could read Proust no sweat, and I’ll have a good laugh.
Else, as far as depth goes, Proust is pretty unmatched.