Internet age has left us all with a shorter attention span
‘Sheer volume of information’
CHILDREN often moan about being bored in the internet age – despite being bombarded with new information every minute of the day.
Now a study suggests that the deluge of material really has shortened our attention spans.
Researchers looked at things such as films, fashions, buzzwords and political issues and found that the public loses interest in them faster than it used to.
Titanic remained at the top of the box office charts for 15 solid weeks in 1997, while Avatar managed just seven weeks in 2009. The average film was found to have remained popular for around two months in the 1980s, while people now take only a week to move on to the next.
Google searches – for everything from Adidas trainers to explanations of complex topics such as Brexit – today remain popular for a quarter of the time they did in 2010.
Even modern phrases, like ‘mansplaining’ or ‘sexting’ may fall out of fashion soon, with researchers finding fashionable phrases which lasted for six months in 19th- century literature now disappear from novels after four weeks.
Perhaps the best example of our attention-deficit age is Twitter – with all posts limited to just 280 characters. Its most popular ‘hashtags’ – or trends – stayed in the top 50 for an average of 17.5 hours in 2013, but did so for only 11.9 hours in 2016.
Study co-author Dr Philipp Hovel, of University College Cork, said: ‘In modern society we are seeing an overload of information created at an increasing pace. But we still have only 24 hours to take it all in, so it is not surprising that our attention spans are reduced.
‘ The phenomenon we have seen may mean that we are struggling to focus or that it is now easier to miss things. It is not people’s fault, but may just be a way of coping with all the information around them.’
To see how we consume information, researchers looked at books, box office figures, tweets, Google searches, posts on internet forum Reddit, Wikipedia pages and scientific studies over time. They found people have ‘shorter bursts of collective attention’ when it comes to almost all of them. Looking at ‘Google trends’ – collections of the most searched topics – a topic would remain popular for up to eight days in 2005. But this fell to just one to two days in 2017. Catchy words or phrases’ hold on our attention was judged using a digital archive of hundreds of thousands of books.
The study, published in journal Nature Communications, concludes that there is ‘competition’ to be new and exciting, and the sheer volume of information ‘exhausts’ our attention.