The Cost of Novelty
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'Novelty' is a bias toward new, shiny, fast stimuli. It elevates salience over meaning/relationship, pulling attention toward the newest input again and again.
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How media and algorithms domesticate your attention?
For many students, the “novelty machine” lives in their pocket. A constant stream of short videos, alerts, and recommendations promises something new every few seconds. It feels light and harmless—scroll a little, laugh a little, move on.
But over time, the costs add up. Attention span shortens; it becomes harder to sit through a lecture, finish a chapter, or stay with a difficult thought. Awareness fragments across multiple apps; empathy and patience decline as everything is judged in seconds. With every swipe and “next,” small pieces of privacy and autonomy are traded away to systems that learn how to keep you hooked.
Parents and teachers see a simple pattern: students are not less intelligent, but it is becoming harder for them to protect time, focus, and emotional stability from the pull of endless novelty.
problem
Mechanisms
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Dopamine cycle
Anticipation stretches, the reward drops fast, and the urge for “one more hit” intensifies.
Novelty must not dominate the mind; the true purpose of education is to restore attention, judgment, and long-term joy. This is why, in PPE100, we focus on 2-hour Critical Thinking seminars that ask students to do what the novelty machine quietly erodes: stay with one text, one question, and one group of people for long enough to think.
In these seminars, students slow down. They read closely instead of skimming, and practice building arguments instead of reacting in seconds. Step by step, they rebuild the capacity to focus.
Our goal is not to ban phones, but to help students regain control of their own attention—so that novelty becomes a tool they can use, rather than a current that carries them away from study, relationships, and a sustainable inner life.
