Short attention spans have become so widespread – reaching a critical mass – that all content creators are increasingly forced to anticipate resistance to any message that takes time to read or view. Authors write shorter books, shorter chapters, shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences, … you get it. Creators think about a video to convey the content of a book, an article, or even a short blog. And the videos are getting shorter and shorter. “Can we get this to 8 seconds?” – coming close to the attention span of a goldfish![1]  

Short attention spans used to be put down to children suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Syndrome (ADHD).[2] Of course, educators and most parents have long understood that it is hard to hold the attention of children. That is one of the reasons that some pioneers of computers in education, like Seymour Papert, saw the “holding power” of interactive computer applications, like LOGO, to be promising as an approach to keeping a student’s attention.[3] LOGO was a means for children to programme a Turtle to move and draw figures on the floor in front of the child programmer.[4]

Decades later, it may be that the creators of interactive systems like computer games have been too successful as parents seem increasingly worried about their children spending too much time playing with their game console or games on their laptop or smartphone.  

It’s different now. It is not simply a problem for youth. A neighbor in his seventies congratulated me on publishing a new book, but then asked me how long it was. Answer: 300 pages. He said he couldn’t cope with a book over a hundred pages. He then admitted he didn’t really have time to read books. I don’t think he was just making up an excuse not to read my work. He probably does not read any books now.

I see too many other examples in everyday life. Frequently, for instance, I realize that many colleagues don’t even read an email once they believe they get the gist of the message, but then they totally miss the questions or points raised at the end of the message. I’ve increasingly parsed my emails into shorter texts with only one-message.  

And there is more systematic empirical evidence of a continuing decline in news readership, both offline and online.[5] Younger adults are less likely to read a newspaper than an senior adult, and an increasing number of younger individuals simply listen to their favorite podcast rather than sourcing their own news online from multiple outlets.  

I agree with the observation that if you don’t read, you are in as bad of a position as someone who can’t read – someone who lacks basic literacy. In this respect, if this problem is becoming more common, then it is potentially debilitating for any society, comparable to a declining literacy rate. Is this problem more widespread or simply a common misperception? If real, what can be done? Are some of the home remedies for short attention spans of any value? We can’t just keep cutting down the length of a message.

Positive news: If you have read to this last sentence, you might well be free of this malady. Congratulations!  

Notes

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[1]https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/

[2]https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/facts.html

[3] Seymour Papert (1980), Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic Books.  

[4]https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/logo_and_learning.html[5]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65880999