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😂
Yes I think you're right. People haven't changed, but the environment has changed - it's continually getting better at manipulating us.
Lemmy does have a limited amount of content, but what it does have seems to be of higher quality. Which is perfect! We don't need constant, cheap content.
I wouldn't agree with "better content" per se.
There's just as much "spam" (links to articles, low effort posts, etc.) as everywhere else. At the same time, the content is waaaay better.
Karma
The fact that you don't have to keep your karma in mind here let's you speak more freely.
If I would say "Pineapple on pizza is disgusting", I would have been downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Here, they just ignore it, OR, don't downvote and tell me why I might be wrong.
Back to Reddit: That, in fact, would give me two options:
- Delete this said comment, which would discourage discussions and make every community hive-minded, or,
- Stay strong to my opinion, and loose the ability to post to many subs anymore, because I now have -5000 Karma.
I always chose 1... Here, I don't care. And this mindset has lead to many great, mind opening discussions.
Even on subs like r/Changemyview or r/Unpopularopinion this culture didn't exist. No opinion was unpopular, merely "weird" (like "I like my socks wet" and stuff). Every "unpopular" opinion was popular on Reddit. And elsewhere, everything was a fight.
On this site, disagreeing is only for useful discussions I had/ read too. It's almost like an "anti-echochamber", and I love it! I love my opinions being challenged.
One more result of that is that the upvote/ downvote function went from "I agree/ I find that funny" or "This is against the subs opinion" to "This comment is worth reading for others and adds value. OP put work into it". WHICH IT SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE BEEN! This button isn't for disagreeing, it's for FILTERING out trash!
Algorithm
Also, there's no algorithm. On many other social media, post that make you laugh (-> mostly dumb stuff or reposts) or promote strong emotions (mostly aggression and tribalism) got promoted.
Here, it's somehow totally random. There's so much "boring" stuff on my trending page. But, I've discovered many cool niche subs here I wouldn't have otherwise. I didn't know so many people were into collecting space rocks and model trains for example 😁
E.g., my own gourmet-mushroom-growing-community got super many views and comments from people who've never heart of that before. That was unbelievable!
On the other hand, there's sooo much useless information, some opt-in filtering/ algorithm wouldn't be bad tbh. But many say that about account karma too, which is a way smaller feature, and that has repercussions too (see above). Something like an algorithm would be HUGE, but also maybe hugely bad for this site?
Idk, tell me! Be controversial! 😁
Not sure it is higher. Last week a cop was ambushed and murdered and of the 50 plus comments, every single one of them were praising the murder. I see that kind of mentality far more here.
Getting off reddit was one of the best things I've done for myself in years. I'm still fairly active on lemmy thanks to having a lot of free time at work but I've also been reading and making an earnest effort to enrich my mind again. Feelsgoodman
This is exactly why I love Lemmy. I noticed it within hours of quitting reddit. The sheer volume of content on Reddit, plus the algorithms, kept my attention for hours. Lemmy just isn't that big and probably 60% of the content I see is in swedish, gerrman, or dutch, which I can't read, so I spend like 15 or 20 minutes max here and then go do something else.
I can relate so much, but instead of only Reddit stealing my time it's a bunch of other things as well. Mostly gaming and random series.
But yeah I remember going thru 8th grade by scrolling reddit all day, school was boring af. Now I only use Lemmy on the bus (rn) or checking for replies before I go to sleep.
I learned very much from yall, and I'm almost convinced reading is worth it, idk what to start reading tho.. Maybe a future tale
I didn't buy an e-reader I just installed Cool Reader which is free. But the result is the same. I probably read five books a month now where before it was probably less than one a year.
I really recommend trying an e-reader in your local shop or borrowing one from a friend if you can.
I've read books on my phone for about a year now, but the "feeling" isn't right there, and I somehow get distracted a bit.
I'm really a fan of "a device should do one thing, and that really good". I bought a camera, a reader, and so on because of that. My software habits are the same. I have dozens of simple apps on my phone and PC, and all of them serve one single purpose. Look up the UNIX-principle if you're interested in more. (Sorry, this site is full of Linux-circlejerk 🙃)
- The camera makes 10x better photos than every top tier smartphone (+ is a fun offline hobby that improves your skills!)
- The reader gives you a display that's super easy on the eyes, lasts for weeks on battery and doesn't distract you.
- My smartphone is only there for communication (Lemmy, messengers, calls) or if I have to quickly look up something on the web
Separating everything really also separates your mind, giving you peace.
It's minimalist and maximalist at the same time.
RSS feeds have made my attention worse. It almost becomes a chore to get my bearded to zero content unread. I also shove my YouTube subs and podcasts in there though.
Yes and no. I think it makes sense when you separate it a bit more.
Instead if throwing everything in one list, create profiles/ categories/ folders/ whatever.
I use it mainly for the public state media in my country. Those "media hubs" are a horrible UX (despite being insanely expensive!) and to fix that I add some of their shows into my RSS, so it works similar to the YouTube subscription box, because somehow german media people are still behind 30 years... In that way I fix that shit for myself because they can't...
I don't use it for example for news or YouTube, since both have a timeline already built in.
I know the song you're talking about! :D
Love the BILD reference
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.
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
I do find it funny that people generally seem to be viewing shorter videos, whereas I often don't want to start a video shorter than 20 minutes. I've been watching a lot of Cathode Ray Dude and those videos have girth.
It's also funny that YouTube tried to kill off short videos a decade ago and are now desperately trying to roll that back.
Some great points! So you think that people's capacity for attention hasn't changed, but the types of media we're exposed nowadays to can encourage us to change our behaviour toward consuming short form content? But if that content wasn't available, they could happily move back toward longer form content?
I do agree that short dopamine hits do make me feel good in the moment, but hollow after the fact. Longer, informative content does lodge itself more into my brain and provide longer lasting feelings of reward.
Yeah I think that’s about right, our capacity hasn’t changed this quickly, just the menu has changed to suit a quick fix appetite.
People can and will still focus on longer form content, but maybe that’s their day job, so they want a bit of a release from in depth activity or ‘important’ information.
I think there is a real danger here in some form… think about how you’d answer the question ‘what did you do on the weekend?’ That could easily be nothing or it could be I watched a great series called severance that explored the concepts of labour and our work and home lives as human beings
It's pretty interesting how there really wasn't any written records for thousands of years. Entire religions and, as in Plato's time, whole schools of thought just weren't written down except for a few students notes.
Obviously time and decay factor into it, but there seems to be a culture shift at a certain point that more people decided to record things other than taxes and itemization.
I argue that the written word is our greatest invention. Without it we'd be back to square one every other generation.
Yep, that’s the root of the ‘how long do you spend thinking about the Roman Empire?’ Meme right?
It’s some of the earliest popular records of reflexive thought and philosophy, available to us because it was recorded, and still the same shit we’re struggling with right now
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.
Mine certainly is.
If you want to compare your attention span to what it once was, try watching older media. The wife and I were watching the walking dead and I was getting bored and that's only 10 years old. Try watching 2001: A Space Odyssey without any distractions. It's torture.
Ok well 2001 was kind of an outlier... you're not wrong. It was slow when I watched it in the 90s lol.
But, watch something like The Maltese Falcon. Which I did recently.
I had no issue following. It didn't plod along in my view (of course I'm middle aged and don't do tiktok). But it also wasn't rapid fire constant clamor. There was space to absorb and reflect as the story evolved. And you need that space because it's mentally challenging.
One thing that hit hard is how it is a good, interesting story above all else. Definitely gives theater vibes and made me realize how hollow a lot of movies are.
Anyway. There are lots of examples from the 60s and 70s that are slower paced and a lot less busy and chaotic than modern films for sure.
Yeah but there are also modern films and TV shows that could be considered "slow" and are fantastic. There's more media in general, and a larger portion is definitely catered to short attention spans, but there's still some great, "slow", shit.
2001 is fucking stellar and I can easily watch it all in one sitting. It’s a banger. I’m mid30s though and also don’t do social media, just forums.
“Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”… I want to know how many kids can get through that these days.
Did you try watching a good show though?
The Walking Dead was a decent show when it started, but it went off the rails pretty quickly. Many hated the second season, especially, but personally, I prefer this slower-paced storytelling. In fact, the thing I don't like in the new episodes is how they're filled with action and unnecessary combat scenes, probably to hold onto the younger generation without an attention span.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'll still sit down to a marathon of LOTR extended edition. So, mine is maybe about the same as 20 years ago. Maybe not though because LOTR could be an exception because it's the GOAT.
Oh, man, LotR is the exception to the rule. I can definitely still enjoy a 12 hour journey to Mordor.
That's a bummer. There are so many great older films out there that you're missing out on. Some of the best media ever created.
Tbh I found the walking dead kind of boring after the first season. There is only so much you can do in a very specific setting before you start falling into a lot of tropes. It got to a point where I started paying too much attention to the wrong things. For example, if I was in a zombified world, I don't think that staying clean shaven from neck to toe would be a priority lol.
No hate to anyone who enjoys it though, you do you. I'm almost certain that I enjoy something that you find boring.
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 noticed my capability to keep my attention on a single subject dramatically increased after Reddit shit the bed and killed 3rd party apps, making me effectively quit social media for a month or two.
I should also really drop Lemmy as well, as much as it is fun it is constantly nagging my brain for attention. It's better than Reddit imo, but short-form content really does make you less able to keep your mind focused. After all, a distraction is just a couple taps away...
I can't stand tiktok, Instagram or any of those short video sites.
I still watch hour long YouTube videos of dudes working on cars and documentaries talking about the most random things you can imagine.
People are getting dumber and their attention span sucks
Every 30 days I have to hide YouTube shorts because if I don't I'll get sucked into a hole until 3 in the morning without even realizing it.
I still watch long form content, but man are those shorts addictive.
How does this work? You watch 100's of ~10 second videos in a row for hours? Trying to understand because this seems to be a common thing these days.
I have never tried tiktok and only saw some YouTube shorts. I see one or two and it annoys me because it's clipped badly, gives bad information, or just shows something meaningless. Random loud music. The same video keeps playing on a loop as I try to think.
Even if it was great content, my brain just couldn't stay focused beyond a couple videos. The constant changes to a new video would be exhausting for me. There's also no time to think about what you just saw.
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?
When my mom was a kid, her grandpa would often watch/listen to the TV, while listening to the radio, and watch out the window and announce who was driving down the road in front of their farm by recognizing their vehicles. Nobody considered it brain rot, his family considered it a skill he had.
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
My tolerance for wasting my time has changed. I have more access to more relevant content closer to my interests, so why should I waste my time with older forms of media that are poorly aligned with me.
What older forms of media are you referring to here?
Everything really. If the first chapter of a book sucks, if a movie starts with a long roll of credits or some idiotic premise. Even YouTube channels I used to watch, if it doesn't capture my attention right away I know where to find content that will. I'm Even learning to do it with the internet and Lemmy over the last couple of months with AI. I can quite literally program friends, experiences, and ask plain text questions and get good answers with cited sources using open source offline AI. It is not about my attention span, it is about the efficiency of the modern world.
If it has, it has only been a recent phenomenon. Hell, the need for a large portion of the population to concentrate for a long period of time is a recent development.
Attention spans are only really an issue where attention was economically valuable.
I don't think this is so much about concentration. It is about tolerance of not being stimulated. It's about how strongly people are driven to seek stimulation when they aren't feeling sufficiently stimulated.
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.
For me the only thing that changed is that I now have options. As a teenager I could watch movies I had no interest in, or play some story heavy rpg game in Japanese or many other things I don't do anymore, but back then the alternative was watching some ice cubes melt. Today I don't do those things because I can do other stuff that appeal to me more.
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'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 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.
Wow, 9 years ago!
Good stuff
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edx9D2yaOGs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
Thanks for this perspective. I wonder if a lot of this isn't so much an issue with attention span, but more a reluctance to put the work in?
That said, it does sound like it's the environment itself that's causing it. If the schools are encouraging 'brain breaks', I assume there's good reason behind it? Does that improve learning/retention?
I suslect one of the reasons brain breaks are happening is that it's nice to have a break as a teacher, too.If it does help retention, it isn't noticeable, but it does help with your relationship with the students, so there's that in its favour. I don't mind about the brain breaks, but the drills and practice were a tried and true method for hundreds of years for a reason; They work, and lead to more output and focus long term. Self motivation is a great skill to have for any future endeavour, even if your job is not related to maths, or biology, or art, or whatever.
One of the activities students always do is "past papers", completing the examination material from historical exams to practice for the real thing. Even the students have pointed out to me the difficulty of the papers has eased in the last twenty years, and the marking rubrics are more forgiving than they were.
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.
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