Chapter One - Attention Spans

Statistics show that the average attention span has decreased over many years, but in more recent years, there’s been a rapid decline in attention spans, with the average sustained attention span falling from 12 minutes to 5 minutes in adolescents in just 10 years, and the focused attention span falling from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in just 3 years. Reports show that the older generations have longer attention spans than the younger, which strongly suggests that the shortening of attention spans is largely due to media consumption, and the increasing convenience due to improving technologies, to receive that media.
It’s been heavily suggested that the internet is to blame for the declining of attention spans over the past years, especially during more recent years with its ever-increasing popularity and accessibility. We can now access the internet almost anywhere by using our computers, laptops, tablets and even mobile phones. Not only can we receive virtually any information we desire on the go, but we can get that information almost instantly.

Nicholas Carr, the author of “The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains” suggests that by using the internet we are actually rewiring and changing the way our brains work. A study carried out by a professor of psychiatry, Gary Small, which involved comparing the brains of people who regularly used the internet and people who didn’t, it showed that after just 5 hours of surfing, the internet  significantly changed the way the users were using their brains. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,”

Restrictions on social media sites aren’t uncommon, with Twitter only allowing you to post using 140 characters, Vine allowing the user to create just a 6 second video, Instagram following the video trend with a slightly longer 15 second restriction and YouTube allowing you to upload a video up to 15 minutes by default.

“In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears.” – Roger Ebert

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.” – Nicholas Carr