>>I'm more concerned when they do it on a busy news day, when the Congress passes a 1500 pages law without reading... or so I think I heard, because there were any number of silly stories that would take 7 or 8 minutes for absolutely no good reason, while the legislative action went completely unnoticed.
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>>Or so I hear - my wife still has the patience to listen to some news in the morning (NPR), sometimes even gets as far as 15 minutes into the BBC news before she's just had enough.
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>1500 pages?!? You must be joking... rule #1 of the media is that the viewer has the attention span of a goldfish.

But it took what, just 100 years to cultivate that span, right? And it's selective. The masses who can't stay on a text which is substantial to their lives (because it may easily contain a "all your base are belong to U.S. govt" clause) are fully able to thumb text messages for hours, or play through several levels of the same game until they beat the excrement out of each other. That selectivity didn't come from nature, that's nurture and engineering.