Episode 3: Attention Spans
They say that our attention spans are shrinking. They say that with the invention of the Internet and all of the conveniences that it has brought with it, we are quickly finding ourselves unable to focus on reading long articles or pieces of writing, especially when we are attempting to read them on a screen.
I first encountered this idea when I read the Atlantic article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr. Carr discusses the feeling of not being able to focus on reading for as long as he used to, getting fidgety after three or four pages instead of getting lost in the narrative of stories. He says that this is a common feeling, something that he has had many friends relate to. Many online writers and bloggers have expressed their inability to read long articles and/or books anymore, despite doing so and enjoying it in the past.
I personally understand and strongly relate to what he is talking about. Even just while reading this article, I found myself struggling to focus and get through the entire twelve and a half page piece. I had to take many breaks and still ended up skimming paragraphs just to get myself through it. I was also a very avid novel reader all the way through high school, but have recently found myself unable to focus deeply on reading, often getting sucked into Netflix or Buzzfeed articles instead.
Wired writer Clive Thompson also writes about this phenomenon in his article "Your Outboard Brain Knows All." Thompson discusses the results of a study done by Ian Robertson that show that younger people recall less personal facts, such as important birthdays and phone numbers, than older people. Thompson claims that this is due to cell phones storing data for us. In my mind, this is the beginning of the decline in attention spans. We can recall less facts because the computer stores it for us so we do not need to pay enough attention to remember the facts. We, therefore, start paying less and less attention to details, which results in our brains having a harder time paying attention to long blocks of reading.
Take this project for example. Think in a more meta way about what you are reading. Throughout this entire project thus far, I have put in strategic breaks in the prose to break it up and make it more visually pleasing and easier to read. This is so that you do not get distracted or bored with the large blocks of text. I haven't broken up this page yet and I have a feeling that you're starting to get bored and distracted reading it, since I've already passed the point at which most people are no longer interested. Here's a fun picture for making it this far.
The blue lighting on screens is supposed to keep us alert and awake. They say you should get off your phones and computers long before you go to bed, but who actually does that? But awake and alert is much different from actual attention. Just because my body is awake and even if my eyes are attracted to the screen, that does not mean that I am giving my full attention, or even any real attention, to what is on the screen. I can't tell you how many times I have read articles for class and had to read parts of them over and over before I have actually taken in what the words in the screen are saying.
It is clear that attention spans are, in fact, shrinking. So then what keeps people watching shows when they can't focus long enough to read an article online or a book in their hands?