The mediocrity of short attention spans

A range of statistics provides proof of short attention spans, but our lives are also filled with practical examples.

It’s morning. You get out of bed. Dragging your feet to the kitchen, you grab a cup of your preferred caffeine source. You check Facebook. Your eyes scan the newspaper and your guilt makes you pick it up, only to peruse several headlines to get a quick idea of what’s happening. You have all the information, but no details.

While there are still those of us out there who prefer to know the whole story rather than just skim the top, the average attention span of internet users has decreased drastically. A range of statistics provides proof of that, but our lives are also filled with practical examples.

Twitter is the best example by far, with a 140-character limit on what people say, the popular website caters to the easily distracted.

Vines, which are also popular in the ‘internet generation’, are short videos that last less than seven seconds on average. An article by the International Business Times reports that nearly half of the users of Google News skim the headlines on the news aggregator site without clicking through to the publisher. However, this is not just limited to the internet, our attention deficits carry through to television as well.

When I first joined The Express Tribune, my family members complained to me about how news channels ‘break news’. Later, I understood that this trend in journalism is related to the damage being done to our attention spans. To accommodate those who prefer to skim through channels rather than commit to just one, reporters tend to repeat the main point of the story, speeding through the details before one can gauge what the report is about.

While I like to think that I am someone who does not lose interest easily, I admit that the only reason this is true is because I make a conscious effort to fall into that category. Even during the writing of this article, I checked my email, wrote a few other stories and replied to a bunch of messages.

With the way things are going, I fear that a character limit will be imposed on what we say in the future, like:

Person A: “I’m not sure what to do about all this cookie batter, the oven stopped working so I can’t bake them, do you know anyone who would be interested in eating … you listening?”

Person B: “Hmm? What? Oh sorry, I stopped listening after you said ‘interested’, 140 characters n’ all.”

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2014.