Pay Attention!

I remember a time when I had a lot of trivial information simply memorized; all zip-codes, phone-numbers and birthdays of my family and friends had a place of their own, permanently stationed inside my mind.

Or at least I thought it was permanent... But then came the digital age; now all this information is stored on my mobile phone with a backup on my network drive at home, and as a consequence most of it isn't stored in my mind anymore. Information in general, not just addresses and phone-numbers, is at our fingertips nowadays; what we need, we look up on some database or another, online or offline. That's great, of course. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to write a post on varied topics every day for you to enjoy, dear reader. Or did you think that everything I write about is in my head? Of course not; I see, hear or read about something that peaks my interest and then I search for more information on the topic. That is even when much of what I share with you is partially based on previously available personal knowledge about a fairly wide range of topics, as I've been an extremely curious person all my life.

Several studies have shown that the digital age has strongly improved our ability to multi-task. But they also show that our attention span has suffered greatly. Not only information, but constant distraction is at our fingertips and we get bored of anything that doesn't gratify some urge within a few seconds. Our heavily commercialized daily reality has cultivated a strong wish, demand even, for instant gratification. Because I noticed the negative effects myself when I realized I stopped memorizing stuff, I looked up some information about human attention spans and I must say it's even worse than I thought...

The average human attention span has shrunk by almost a quarter in just 15 years, between 2000 and 2015: from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds, to be more exact. Now, I don't know how they measure the attention span of a goldfish, but these little aquatic pets have attention spans of 9 seconds on average, beating us humans by three quarters of a second!! Take a look at this infographic for this, and some more rather shocking facts about how our always-online-lifestyles influence our mental abilities.

Much of this is caused, I'm sure, by the fact that in the online world "attention" has become a scarce resource in a place that's overloaded with content. In this proverbial sea of content creators, everyone is fighting for the attention of potential audiences in the attention economy If end users of an online application have to search for too long to get to the desired information, they'll just look for another application. This has incentivized the creators of these applications, these platforms, to offer the information in a targeted, personalized and bite-sized manner. This is even true for video. Even when we prefer to watch a video as opposed to read about something, the video has to be short as well. According to this guide on optimal lengths for online video, the average length of the top 50 YouTube videos is 2.54 minutes.

On Psychology Today, I found this attention span test, right here; try it out. I had, to my surprise, a fairly good score of 88 out of 100. Maybe it isn't too surprising though; for more than four years now I've had the discipline to write and publish an article every day, and I guess that proves I can at least concentrate on one task for anything between 30 minutes and 2 hours; words don't flow as easily some days ;-) And maybe I'm lucky to have lived a fairly long time without the internet.

I have no idea how this development will pan out in our future, but I do believe we should at least try to catch up with the goldfish. During a lecture, a book, or a movie, when we miss only a few seconds, we might have missed essential information. In the movie and the book we can go back (do you catch yourself re-reading and re-watching a lot?), but not during conversations or lectures. This is surely something to be concerned about I think... I'll leave you with a video I recommend you watch if you recognize any of the stuff I've mentioned here, and maybe take the challenge therein, which is to try and do a month without the internet, or only use the internet for specific tasks, to break the always online habit or addiction.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!