Can’t think with all this distraction
We’re living in a state of permanent partial attention and interruptions are interrupted
You’re probably reading this column while you make your Saturday morning espresso, listen to the weather forecast and watch a YouTube video about cats chasing their tail — all while checking your messages every 13 seconds.
I understand. It’s hard to pay attention nowadays, when there are so many things to distract us: texts, tweets, “breaking news” alerts, sports updates and longterm weather forecasts people follow like their stock portfolio.
“Ohmigod — the 21-day forecast says rain! There goes three weekends from now.”
We live in an Age of Distraction, when really — who has the attention span to pay attention?
We are all binging, pinging and dinging with urgently humming phone alerts.
My own phone keeps asking me if I want to add new “badges, banners, waves and sounds” — so I can buzz and vibrate full-time like a Hydro tower.
We live in a state of permanent partial attention, where something is always interrupting our interruption.
Uh-oh — there goes my parking alarm, warning me to move the car before it’s towed away.
I’ll be back in a flash — but now would be a good time to check your Facebook feed. … OK, I’m back. What’d I miss? There’s so much information streaming in it’s hard to retain — our thoughts drifting through our brains for mere seconds, as if we were goldfish.
Sorry, that’s unfair to goldfish. A 2015 Microsoft study found the human attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds to eight seconds since 2000, while a goldfish can still focus for nine seconds.
How does this affect our behaviour? Recently, I started reading a thoughtful essay online about the new “sexual reformation” in the post-Weinstein era — but early on, it had a link to the “latest sexual harassment news.”
Curious, I clicked the link, which soon sent me to another gossipy site about the latest U.S. Congressman caught in Groper-gate — which linked me to another website about Sexual Congress in Congress, which linked to a story about … Anyway, I never did get back to that thoughtful essay.
We’ve lost our patience for sticking with anything “longer” than a few seconds: long articles, long conversations, long jokes, or literature longer than 140-characters.
In barely a generation we’ve gone from five-page, hand-written letters to 50-word emails, to terse texts filled with LOL, BTW acronyms. Pretty soon, we’ll only communicate in emojis.
Hang on — something’s pinging again ... Sorry, it’s only an alert from an online store, letting me know there’s only one Krueger espresso-maker left in stock since I checked it out five months ago.
Now, what were we talking about?
Oh, yeah! … Adding to our attention-impaired times is U.S. Distractor-in-Chief Donald Trump — forever tweeting another madcap message meant to distract us from yesterday’s madcap tweet, meant to distract us from the Russia inquiry.
The New York Times is lying, again. The special prosecutor is running a witch-hunt. Crooked Hillary is a witch who’s secretly concocted the North Korean nuclear program.
Let’s hope when they look back on Trump’s time in office, he’s only remembered as a distraction.
Our attention-deficit is aggravated by our consumer society, where there’s always something urgently trivial to decide. Which of 73 phones should you buy, along with which of 37 phone plans? — giving you a total of 2,701 possibilities to think about obsessively for the next week.
Which of today’s 375 menu items do you really want before your waiter finally gets bored and disappears? You: Sorry, what was that seventh item on the list of today’s specials? … You know the gluten-free thing in coddled kale — or maybe it was zucchini, or … Waiter: Why don’t I give you some time to decide, sir? You: Wait! I’ll be right back in only two hours. I’ll have whatever that table’s having!
How did people cope in earlier centuries with no messages to check, no weather alerts dinging, no presidential tweets and blurts to distract them? Today, we get edgy so quickly we can’t even wait in a supermarket line, or for our toast to pop up — without pulling out our phones.
TV channels have started abandoning their traditional 30 and even 15 second commercials because viewers can’t focus that long. Instead, they’re reducing them to six seconds — marketing to goldfish.
You already see six-second ads all over the internet: You start reading some site when an annoyingly loud video ad pops up somewhere off-screen — but by the time you scroll up to find the “skip ad” button, the ad is over.
Then, as soon as you start reading again, it pops up somewhere else off-screen, sounding even louder. It’s enough to drive you to … distraction.
No wonder there are books coming out with titles like The Erosion of Attention and Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction.
They sound really interesting — if I only had some time.
Maybe I’ll get my goldfish to read them.