How information overload is killing our attention span
INFORMATION overload in an age when films, books and internet searches are instantly available at our fingertips is causing our attention to narrow, a major new study has found.
Scientists from University College Cork and other European universities found that as the amount of information battling for our attention continues to increase, our collective attention span is shrinking.
They measured ‘social acceleration’, a term used to describe how society is speeding up, by examining data from social media sites, Google Trends, books, movie ticket sales going back 40 years, and citations of scientific publications from the past 25 years.
The study found there is shorter bursts of attention among people as well as items staying relevant for a shorter period of time.
When looking into the global daily top 50 hashtags on Twitter, for example, the scientists found peaks became increasingly steep and frequent. In 2013 a hashtag stayed in the top 50 for an average of 17.5 hours. This gradually decreases to 11.9 hours in 2016.
This trend is mirrored when looking at other domains – online and offline – and covering different periods.
The researchers looked, for instance, at the shortened time that movies stay in cinemas, the rate of Google searches and the number of Reddit comments on individual submissions.
When examining Wikipedia and scientific publications, however, this trend was not mirrored. Though the exact reason is unclear, the authors suggest it could be because the type of person using such research may not mirror the public’s behaviour.
Lecturer in applied mathematics at UCC and one of the authors of the study, Dr Philipp Hövel, said his team wanted to definitively measure if our attention spans were shortening. ‘We wanted to understand which mechanisms could drive this behaviour... we designed a mathematical model with three basic ingredients: novelty, ageing and the thirst for something new.
‘It seems that the allocated attention in our collective minds has a certain size, but that the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed. This would support the claim that it has indeed become more difficult to keep up to date on the news cycle, for example.’
The study found that the increased levels of content production and consumption has led to a more rapid exhaustion of our limited attention resources. When more content is produced in less time, it exhausts the collective attention earlier. The shortened peak of public interest for one topic is directly followed by the next topic due to the fierce competition for novelty.
Fierce competition for novelty