It is often said that goldfish have very short memories. While researchers continue to debate whether or not that is actually true, the idea has been attached to younger media consumers, who have been called the Goldfish Generation.
The Goldfish Generation generally refers to younger millennials, Gen Z and Generation Alpha – basically anyone who grew up with smartphones, screens and the ability to have digital content in front of their eyes within seconds.
They tend to lack the patience to sit through advertisements that their predecessors had to endure for decades. They also know full well that they can change the content to fit their mood at the blink of an eye and the swipe of the finger. At a very young age they learnt how to use tablets and smartphones, and navigate YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels. Once in a while, you will even notice a young child trying to swipe a physical book as though it were an iPad.
Most controversially, the Goldfish Generation has the been assigned the unfortunate stigma of having a shorter attention span, although the evidence behind that accusation is mixed.
Nevertheless, there is something distinctly different about how younger audiences are consuming content. That in turn is changing how content is created, distributed and ultimately rewarded monetarily.
At the 2024 Global Media Congress in Abu Dhabi, the Generation Goldfish label was the topic of a panel discussion with long-time media professionals from Vice, TikTok and Blinx.
“I do believe that calling this the Goldfish Generation is unfair,” said Rafael Lavor, head of strategy at Vice, a digital media and broadcast company. “Our minds have been the same for millions of years,” he said, before turning to how social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have cracked the code of users' brains.
“They can release a payoff for each one of the users in a few seconds and this is the reality we are in right now. It's addictive, so that's why they're a bit hooked, it's not that the attention spans are shorter, but rather, we found a way to keep audiences hooked with small videos,” he said, referring to dopamine and how long-form cinema uses similar strategies, albeit on a smaller scale.
Shadi Kandil, general manager of global business solutions for TikTok, also disagreed with the notion that user attention spans were getting shorter and agreed that the Generation Goldfish label was somewhat unfair.
“This is not new,” he explained to the panel audience, referencing the research of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman on decision-making and psychology.
“In the context of science, this has been around for the longest time. What has changed is the volume of content we're dealing with on a daily basis … as well as the immediacy of the content,” he said. The mind is capable of coping with the information onslaught, he added.
“If we want to subject ourselves to a certain piece of content or want to deal with a task, we give it our attention to get to the bottom of it, but if it's something we want to shun … we tend to avoid it, and it's the same of media,” he said.
Mr Lavor and Mr Kandil both agreed that what appeals to newer audiences was changing slightly, and authenticity seemed to be a common thread through successful content across multiple social platforms.
Authenticity, according to Mr Lavor, was key to the successful videos for Vice. “We try to be the one with the most authentic voice, especially with the younger audiences. The more authentic we are we feel like it resonates better, so we're bringing artistry back into content making,” he said.
Mr Kandil echoed those sentiments, with some additional context. “Media and content is a utility and that utility needs to serve a purpose. People seek content because they want to be informed, they want to be entertained, they want to increase knowledge about a specific area. That doesn't change,” he said.
While TikTok is a platform and not a content producer like Vice, Mr Kandil explained how the company's app helped to make it easier for content to be discovered, and noted how the technology behind that app is changing how all generations find content.
“Our engine that serves up the content, we've built an immaculate piece of engineering” he explained, referring to TikTok's algorithm that is the envy of much of the social media world.
“We source out the content that users are putting out there and we find the right moment in time when another user is looking for that piece of content and we match the two together,” he said.
Also taking issue with the Goldfish Generation label was Fadi Radi, chief creative officer at Blinx, a Dubai-based digital media hub focused on Middle Eastern youth content. However, Mr Radi did say that, because of the interfaces of high-speed data transfers of many social media apps, the first three seconds of video content were more crucial than ever to grab users' attention.
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Publisher: EA Sports
Consoles: PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S
Rating: 3/5
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Tests 46; Runs 2,103; Best 166; Average 32.85; 100s 6; 50s 8; Wickets 42; Best 4-47
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Top 10 in the F1 drivers' standings
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2. Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-GP 188
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Series information
Pakistan v Dubai
First Test, Dubai International Stadium
Sun Oct 6 to Thu Oct 11
Second Test, Zayed Stadium, Abu Dhabi
Tue Oct 16 to Sat Oct 20
Play starts at 10am each day
Teams
Pakistan
1 Mohammed Hafeez, 2 Imam-ul-Haq, 3 Azhar Ali, 4 Asad Shafiq, 5 Haris Sohail, 6 Babar Azam, 7 Sarfraz Ahmed, 8 Bilal Asif, 9 Yasir Shah, 10, Mohammed Abbas, 11 Wahab Riaz or Mir Hamza
Australia
1 Usman Khawaja, 2 Aaron Finch, 3 Shaun Marsh, 4 Mitchell Marsh, 5 Travis Head, 6 Marnus Labuschagne, 7 Tim Paine, 8 Mitchell Starc, 9 Peter Siddle, 10 Nathan Lyon, 11 Jon Holland
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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Slow loris biog
From: Lonely Loris is a Sunda slow loris, one of nine species of the animal native to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore
Status: Critically endangered, and listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list due to growing demand in the global exotic pet trade. It is one of the most popular primate species found at Indonesian pet markets
Likes: Sleeping, which they do for up to 18 hours a day. When they are awake, they like to eat fruit, insects, small birds and reptiles and some types of vegetation
Dislikes: Sunlight. Being a nocturnal animal, the slow loris wakes around sunset and is active throughout the night
Superpowers: His dangerous elbows. The slow loris’s doe eyes may make it look cute, but it is also deadly. The only known venomous primate, it hisses and clasps its paws and can produce a venom from its elbow that can cause anaphylactic shock and even death in humans
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Infiniti QX80 specs
Engine: twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V6
Power: 450hp
Torque: 700Nm
Price: From Dh450,000, Autograph model from Dh510,000
Available: Now
The specs
- Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8
- Power: 640hp
- Torque: 760nm
- On sale: 2026
- Price: Not announced yet
BMW M5 specs
Engine: 4.4-litre twin-turbo V-8 petrol enging with additional electric motor
Power: 727hp
Torque: 1,000Nm
Transmission: 8-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 10.6L/100km
On sale: Now
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Company profile
Date started: 2015
Founder: John Tsioris and Ioanna Angelidaki
Based: Dubai
Sector: Online grocery delivery
Staff: 200
Funding: Undisclosed, but investors include the Jabbar Internet Group and Venture Friends
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Why are asylum seekers being housed in hotels?
The number of asylum applications in the UK has reached a new record high, driven by those illegally entering the country in small boats crossing the English Channel.
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
Asylum seekers and their families can be housed in temporary accommodation while their claim is assessed.
The Home Office provides the accommodation, meaning asylum seekers cannot choose where they live.
When there is not enough housing, the Home Office can move people to hotels or large sites like former military bases.
Nepotism is the name of the game
Salman Khan’s father, Salim Khan, is one of Bollywood’s most legendary screenwriters. Through his partnership with co-writer Javed Akhtar, Salim is credited with having paved the path for the Indian film industry’s blockbuster format in the 1970s. Something his son now rules the roost of. More importantly, the Salim-Javed duo also created the persona of the “angry young man” for Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s, reflecting the angst of the average Indian. In choosing to be the ordinary man’s “hero” as opposed to a thespian in new Bollywood, Salman Khan remains tightly linked to his father’s oeuvre. Thanks dad.
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In numbers: China in Dubai
The number of Chinese people living in Dubai: An estimated 200,000
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Percentage increase in visitors in eight years: 500 per cent
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The five pillars of Islam
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2.
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