Excerpts from an interesting essay in The Atlantic:

Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”

I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones...

At Indiana University, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus’s internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he said, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. (Recall that these are students who chose to take a film class.) Even when students stream the entire film, it’s not clear how closely they watch it. Some are surely folding laundry or scrolling Instagram, or both, while the movie plays...

In a multiple-choice question on a recent final exam, Jeff Smith, a film professor at UW Madison, asked what happens at the end of the Truffaut film Jules and Jim. More than half of the class picked one of the wrong options, saying that characters hide from the Nazis (the film takes place during World War I) or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway (who does not appear in the movie).

There’s more at the link, of course. I disagree with the suggestion that the inattentiveness is related to "cellphone addiction" or social media withdrawal anxiety. Another powerful factor is the need to efficiently make use of one’s time.

I am a cinema enthusiast, as evidenced by having two subsections of TYWKIWDBI dedicated to "movies" and "video-movies." But I watch all my movies and streaming series on recordings rather than live. I want to have the ability to stop the movie, freeze-frame for details, rewind to view for second or third times, and yes to fast-forward through the boring bits. IMHO life is too short to do otherwise.

The same applies to sports. A football game with 1 hour of game clock time may require 3 hours of viewing live on television (or at the stadium). I can view all the content (including highlight repeats) by fast-forwarding a recording.