Are attention spans actually shortening?
Are attention spans actually shortening?
So a view I see a lot nowadays is that attention spans are getting shorter, especially when it comes to younger generations. And the growing success of short form content on Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter for example seems to support this claim. I have a friend in their early 20s who regularly checks their phone (sometimes scrolling Tiktok content) as we're watching a film. And an older colleague recently was pleased to see me reading a book, because he felt that anyone my age and younger was less likely to want to invest the time in reading.
But is this actually true on the whole? Does social media like Tiktok really mould our interests and alter our attention? In some respects I can see how it could change our expectations. If we've come to expect a webpage to load in seconds, it can be frustrating when we have to wait minutes. But to someone that was raised with dial-up, perhaps that wouldn't be as much of an issue. In the same way, if a piece of media doesn't capture someone in the first few minutes they may be more inclined to lose focus because they're so used to quick dopamine hits from short form content. Alternatively, maybe this whole argument is just a 'kids these days' fallacy. Obviously there are plenty of young adults that buck this trend.
Nothing has changed
I don't believe anything has changed neurologically or psychologally in the last decades.
There have always been people who are more susceptible to consume "trashy" (provoking, easy to consume) media.
Once it was low-quality newspapers (a german band once refered to them as "fear, hate, tits and the weather forecast", which fits really well!), then it was trash TV, then mobile games, and now TikTok and stuff. Some people are just attracted to flashy stuff and can't get enough dopamine.
It's just that the latter example is very new, and everything new is automatically bad, no matter what.
There have always been young people who read books, create art, video game, listen or create music, have hobbies, and so on.
BUT, something has changed:
One word: attention economy. Capitalism realized, that especially in combination with ads, you can create A LOT of money by making easy to consume content.
If a platform uses dark patterns (emotional or funny content, reinforcement, short content instead of longer stuff, flashy stuff, likes, endless scrolling, keeping you as long as possible in the app, etc.), it makes a lot more money with it's users.
Years of algorithms perfectionized manipulating you and your attention span with supernatural stimuli (as mentioned above).
What to do with those informations?
Notice, how boring Lemmy, RSS-feeds, and stuff like that are?
After checking my posts for this day, I'm done and do something different, like cleaning the kitchen. Now, I'm on the toilet and don't have anything else to do, and I have fun answering you :)
That's how our devices should work. I don't wanna be a slave, I want to own my device, and not the other way around.
Tbh, I'm grateful Reddit went downhill. A year ago I could never imagine nuking my account.
I spent my whole teenage and now adult years (15 - now) on that shithole, was super addicted and couldn't spend 2 minutes without checking my phone, even in meetings, dates, and so on. It was just as bad as vaping for me. I knew, that it was slowly killing every brain cell, but "loved" it too much.
Thanks, u/spez ❤️ You killed Reddit for me and made my new "Reddit" (-> Lemmy, but with the same app) THAT boring for me I bought an e-reader now to read books instead😂
It's genuinely more effective in today's society to skim read and give up if the content isn't good. There is so much time wasting bullshit, misinformation, ads, and scams put in front of us. But we don't have a great defense mechanism, so our attention spans have suffered alongside the quickening of our skepticism response.
I remember when I was a kid they'd discuss teens as the "MTV generation", kids who didn't really watch TV, they just watched music videos, and even then there was scrolling news down the bottom and boxes would pop up on the side showing different things. They said kids had attention spans of 12 seconds and it would cause massive issues with finding work and being productive as adults.
I'm in my 30's now and I've heard the same thing about every generation since.
It seems that the real issue is that teenagers have short attention spans and adults have amnesia.
Yes behaviourally, no empirically.
You get a positive dopamine reactive from viewing multiple short form content pieces in succession, you get an arguably more valuable serotonin reaction from viewing a more in depth piece and maybe feeling like you learned something.
How you’re affected by these feelings of satisfaction will influence your behaviour. I recently compared mine and my wife’s weekends, she’d watched a lot of short form content and couldn’t remember a thing, felt empty from it, I’d watched a series of a tv show and could talk about the story and concepts.
But that’s not all there is to it, Plato argued that the written world would dumb people down because they no longer had to remember things and pass them on vocally, maybe a decrease in the requirement for individual cognition, but obviously an overall good.
Edit: edit was messing with me so I couldn’t add this til now. I’m just a drunk guy enjoying dinner and browsing Lemmy, what you’re looking for is the simple answer, the dopamine hit, a minimal conversation. Put your attention span to the test and look into some open access research on the subject, it’ll be fun! And its all that seperate us from the YouTubers that we venerate so much
And the growing success of short form content on Tiktok, Youtube and Twitter for example seems to support this claim.
You can't really make a conclusion from this. Maybe our short attention span is the reason short form content is so popular.
I guess it's not our attention span declining, but just that we are not used to waiting or getting bored.
i remember Michael Stevens saying in an interview with Anthony Padilla that the subway surfers gameplay concept isnt really new and we've been doing the same thing for ages, rather than subway surfers while listening to some bot read reddit posts, people were listening to their friends while looking at birds or animals at a zoo, or even getting heavily intoxicated to help converse with your friends.
and people have said that people are getting dumber but i think theyre just young let them grow up then compare. we have been laughing at stupid ass jokes, shitty songs and toilet humour since the beginning of time.
people from the 13th century might be saying that we're lazy for not making our clothes by and settling for an inferior product made by machines, but in the grand scheme, does it really matter that much?
It's almost like you started reading this Time Article but never finished.
Or maybe this sciences times article
While the consensus is out about whether or not or attention spans are really shortening, most sources say whatever is going on, isn't permanent...yet.
We still have the ability to unplug and find something that's truly interesting to us, something that we care about, and focus on it. We just have to find it, and then, actually do it.
Tl;dr
First results after a few minutes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790
"No evidence of shrinking"
"We can't tell"
I can only speak for myself, and am not a teen, but I can tell you I used to be able to, but can no longer: hear a person's phone number once and memorize it, remember 4-5 directional turns without writing it down, watch a 2 hour movie I'm not enthralled with, stare at traffic or people walking by and not be upset I'm wasting my time.
I think it's more the access to knowledge and productivity that has changed our society's concept of what needs to be remembered or what we should spend our thought on, than it is a generational neuro-difference.
I'd think it's more that there's now more media fighting your attention. When I was a kid (GenX here), we had a handful of TV channels and books. Books was what I went with.
Nowadays, I get home from work and watch something on YouTube before bed. I still read, but my standards have risen, and a trashy space opera won't do it anymore for me. It has to be a great one now, and there are fewer of them. So, naturally, YouTube gets a bigger share of my time. Or games, when I have time to play on the weekends. My comfort game used to be Civilization, and currently I'm hooked on Baldurs Gate.
I can't comment outside of personal experience, but I noticed my retention has gotten incredibly short. I have this little slab constantly calling for my attention and won't let me focus on anything for a long period of time. Then, because of the convenience of storing everything electronically and having it in that same little slab, I have noticed that I can't really remember much. However, as of late, I have taken up journaling and writing everything down with pen and paper, and this has allowed me to remember and focus better on things.
I have heard that because writing is slower than typing things, it gives more time for our brains to memorize them. Also, I have turned off all notifications and left all social networks, and I can feel more engaged in whatever is going on in my real life.
I don't know anything about it from a scientific ground but I know about myself. I am what ai consum. I'm also a big fan of boredom because it activates creativity. The more I leave my phone in my pocket when I've got nothing to do, the more creative I get. I believe that this also plays into having longer attention spans. But not completly sure how. Maybe somebody else has an idea?
I dare you to watch this whole video.
I think it's not the attention. Too little time has gone since the computational revolution of the 70s for us to see any evolutionary changes. The way we communicate and process info had changed very dramatically though. Information travels faster, spreads wider, all the feedback cycles that used to be weeks long have now tightened down to milliseconds. Or culture requires faster reaction, processing and production times of everyone involved.
As a teacher: Essays written in exam conditions have become shorter over time. The exam is not shorter in length. A successful art, history, or English HSC exam would be completed with 6, 8 or 12 pages or more in the 1990s, and now likely has half those pages. Still 1.5 or 2 hours or three hours long, as it was back in the 90s.
Maths? "Brain breaks" are in vogue. 20 years ago, a high level senior student (age 16-18) would be expected to do calculus for a two hour "double" lesson. Now if they work on calculus for half an hour, they expect to have a ten minute break and start work again. Does this make the student more productive? No, they complete less pages of the same textbook. Newer textbooks, correspondingly, have far less physical work in them than textbooks written 20 years ago.
The "non academic" track? There are less apprenticeships available, and students get rejected from the few that exist. 40 years ago the NSW trains had 200 apprenticeships a year. Now they have four a year. We have had apprentices sent back to us two weeks in with the (fail level) complaint "won't put his phone away." The teen is then put back in the academic track, as education opportunities are compulsory, and they learn nothing as the accusation is true.
Yes, with this evidence, you might be right about this lot.
I'm very impatient and I don't do that. I think people checking their phones when they are supposed to be watching something is a sign that whatever they're watching doesn't interest them as much.
The only reason I don't switch to my phone is because if realise that's the case, I'd rather do something else entirely instead- imo if it doesn't grab my attention 100% then the time I dedicate to the rest of it feels wasted. But I know people who enjoy series that have a lot of filler and fluff, and they will be multitasking while watching.
Just my two cents from personal observation, but I find that a lot of it is just evolving technology. For instance, checking your phone and browsing content if a movie isn't actually all that interesting literally just wasn't a possibility all that long ago. You just sat there and waited for it to be interesting again, or left. It's not particularly bad to decide to do something else if what you're doing isn't really of interest, nor does it mean you don't have an attention span long enough for a movie
Or expecting things to load quickly. Since it's possible, why would anyone want to spend more time watching a loading screen? Nobody woke up on Christmas 2006 and was excited that their jew sonic game spent more time loading than playing. The idea of delayed gratification is only relevant if the delay actually offers some benefit. 2 marshmallows later or one now is an entirely different question from one marshmallow now, or one in a couple minutes when something loads.
And an older colleague recently was pleased to see me reading a book, because he felt that anyone my age and younger was less likely to want to invest the time in reading.
Tbh that's really just a "kids these days" moment. The overwhelming majority of what people read for personal enjoyment is no more an 'investment' of time than any other media of equal interest.
same way, if a piece of media doesn't capture someone in the first few minutes they may be more inclined to lose focus because they're so used to quick dopamine hits from short form content.
That's just called valuing my time. Unless I have some reason to believe it gets good later, I'm not going to keep going on a piece of media that isn't interesting. "it gets good in season 4, just make sure you also watch the specials and read a summary of the mobile game that got shut down, you'll love it", like, I'll take your word bro, it ain't worth my time for all that. And this has been a thing for ages. Perhaps you've heard the term in medias res in an English class at some point? Hooking the audience is a crucial part of successful media.
I can barely watch a movie to the end
@OmegaMouse Attention spans shorten, while stomach spans enlarge.
I think the question is flawed and so are the responses. You all wrote far too much so I cba to read