Have attention spans shortened and if so what impact has it had on
Western cinema?
It’s been reported that modern day attention spans have dropped from 12 minutes to a mere 5 in the last 10 years. [1] Things are becoming available to us faster and faster such as the internet, for example. First we had dial-up, then broadband became available and people couldn’t believe the speed of it compared to Dial-up. Broadband soon became sub-standard, not living up to people’s need for speed and limited patience. Now fibre optic broadband is the next big thing, allowing you to potentially download an entire HD film in less than 20 seconds; a massive improvement to the standard Broadband’s inferior best time of 49 minutes [2]. This changing technology is allowing it’s recipients to indulge their constant need for instantaneous access to digital media. The introduction of “tabs” on web browsers has also made it easier to flit between web pages whilst waiting for others to load. It seems internet users seek the need to be constantly stimulated by new information and data in order not to get bored.
Nicholas Carr argues that the internet has affected the way we think. He compared the internet to books and how, once when books were more popular, they helped their readers focus on a single thing for an extended amount of time, whereas the internet has done the opposite. The internet as a multimedia system, combines different platforms of media, such as text, video and images etc, bombarding us with plenty to look at on every page, and giving us options for how we consume the data we are given. [3] He also stated at an appearance in a book store introducing his book that “I know what you’re thinking. The very existence of this book would seem to contradict its thesis. It wasn’t easy. When I began, I struggled in vain to keep my mind fixed on the task. I wrote in disconnected spurts, like I did when I was writing on my blog. I moved to the mountains of Colorado. There was no cell phone service and internet arrived through a pokey DSL connection. I cancelled my twitter account, put my Facebook membership on hiatus and shut down my blog. I also throttled back my email application.”
Social media sites are now being designed to deliver its users messages with a limit on content. Sites such as Twitter allow users to send a “tweet” limited to only 140 characters or less. Sites like Vine have a 6 second limit on the videos you can create and upload, whereas Instagram has a slightly longer 15 second limit. Internet users tend to check these things on a near-daily basis, and so are becoming used to consuming information delivered in a small dose as well as making it.
