I’ll make this brief.
With so much information available from so many places these days, we don’t have the focus we used to and our attention spans have collectively grown shorter.
You’re dismissed if you like, because that’s the gist of this story.
A European group of academics looked parameters of attention span including movies, google searches and time spent on Reddit, among many other things, and determined that we got lost in the avalanche of information that invades our waking hours.
“There’s just a tremendous volume of information coming at us so we have less time to focus on particular things,” points out UT Austin psychology professor Dr. Art Markham. “One of the things about having so much information is that it’s not curated for us. Now that we get a dump of information a lot of what we end up reading and seeing isn’t that interesting.”
Read more. Know less.
Six years ago the top trending topic on Twitter lasted around 17 ½ hours. Within three years it had dropped to less than 12 hours.
Focus.