Don't fret, Mom and Pop, that your kids are growing up with a short attention span. It's just that today, changes in experience are more compelling than experience itself. In the same way the wheel gave our ancestors speed, or the rate of change in position, the remote control brings us the rate of change in experience. We now pay attention to what mathematicians would call the derivative of experience.
This mutation is hardly unprecedented. Some dinosaurs, for example, evolved a visual system more attuned to changes in scenery than scenery per se. But perhaps humans can go beyond the derivative. Perhaps our kids' kids will tune in on the change in the change of experience. The acceleration.
Maybe entertainment designers should start figuring out what the hell a second derivative of experience looks like, then start peddling that.
