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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#31

Post by booboofixer »

orphea wrote: post #11
lotsofpulp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that has to do with excessively long movies and nothing to do with reduced attention spans. Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min.

> I think that has to do with excessively long movies Anecdotal experience but we (n=2) didn't have the urge to pull out our phones on Oppenheimer (180 minutes).

Agreed. Went to watch Mission Impossible, i pulled out my phone once right at the beginning to put it on silent. My friend might have checked his phone three times for any texts/time maybe.

All I'd like to add to this conversation is a request to not treat all humans as "the average human" as deduced by any scientific study.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#33

Post by jjoonathan »

There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more.

Yes, there are costs -- deep work & study both suffer -- but there are benefits too: informational content that can be compressed does get compressed. An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video and then a 30 second tiktok, by which point it has become a snap cut between the critical actions and finger-wag followed by pitfalls. You can look it up, watch it multiple times until it's committed to memory, and you don't have to spend hours torturing yourself with irrelevant tangents and nonsense. This is an astonishingly compact form of communication and it's beautiful to see.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#34

Post by europeanNyan »

morkalork wrote: post #24
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min. I’ve read somewhere that blockbuster movies are trending longer at the moment, because people are ever less willing to pay the high prices for cinema tickets, drinks and snacks, so movie studios need to offer a really big experience to make it seem worthwhile.

This is true but it's getting to be too much. I want to see Oppenheimer in theatres but 3 hours plus travel is just killing it for me.

Don't forget the ads. They have gotten obnoxiously long. The last time I went, the ads for products and trailers went on for 45 minutes with an intermission so they can sell ice cream and snacks. I haven't been to the movies since.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#35

Post by 31337Logic »

asynchronous wrote: post #15
dingusdew wrote: post #3

It's not enough to just base this on screens. It's also workplace environments. Even something as "simple" as working in a pizza place, say Domino's, is increasingly a frantic assembly line where orders can come at a breakneck pace through internet applications. You'll still be working somewhere perpetually understaffed and who give you basically no training, but expect you to pay attention to multiple threads at onc…

I’d somewhat agree that culturally we just don’t value sustained single task work anymore. If you can’t multitask 15 things then you’re useless.

... even though the myth of multitasking had already been debunked many times over. I agree with you; It's a sad state of affairs.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#36

Post by eikenberry »

cglong wrote: post #5

I went to a theater to watch Mission: Impossible last night. It has a really long runtime (2h 48m) and, toward the end of the film, I started seeing multiple people pull out their phones for a time check; I had to stop myself from doing the same.

I think this says more about the quality of the movie than it does people's attention spans. A movie that doesn't keep you sucked in until the end is just a bad movie.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#37

Post by disadvantage »

> In 2004, in our earliest study, we found that people averaged about one hundred fifty seconds (two and a half minutes) on a computer screen before switching their attention to another screen

Maybe it's just me, but I look at several different screens each day (Phone, Workstation, Raspberry Pi for home network logging using Pi-Hole, and a tablet). Not to mention our main TV. This is all normal for people these days. One screen for everything doesn't cut it, unless you are very disciplined and force yourself to use one device for everything, but I don't see the main purpose of that.

Maybe if you're running a business with tricky logistics, you need to be pinned to a single device and need real-time interaction with your systems to get things done?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#38

Post by ghaff »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #17
lotsofpulp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that has to do with excessively long movies and nothing to do with reduced attention spans. Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min.

> Very, very few action movies need to be more than 100min. I’ve read somewhere that blockbuster movies are trending longer at the moment, because people are ever less willing to pay the high prices for cinema tickets, drinks and snacks, so movie studios need to offer a really big experience to make it seem worthwhile.

While I watched a lot of films on the big screen at school (I was involved in the film group), over the years I've watched fewer and fewer. These days my maybe once a year criterion is whether it's something I'd want to see in IMAX if I could. Though I'm not sure how much length has to do with it.

I'm honestly surprised that movie theaters have come back to such a degree. I suppose the lesson is that the pandemic didn't really change things all that much--certainly not to the degree a lot of people expected. Even more flexible work arrangements, much less fully remote work, is mostly in some bubbles.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#39

Post by disadvantage »

skilled wrote: post #22

People hack themselves to find the quickest release of feel-good chemicals in their brain but most do it at the expense of not realizing that it numbs their entire existence. And now it’s more prevalent than it ever has been. Grabbing a phone is a nice way to stay in the shell that you have built around yourself and pretend like you have control over your life, but no one has control over their lives. The more you bu…

> The more you build walls of ideas around yourself the easier it becomes to make you discombobulated with the slightest gust of wind.

Resilience can be cultivated with practice. The more you enter caves you don't want to enter, the more treasure you find.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#40

Post by HatchedLake721 »

I like the theory that the reason attention span has declined is because the demand for quality has hugely increased.

Since there are so many blogs, films, books and videos out there, we no longer want to waste time on things that don't entertain or provide value to us.

If in the past you might've given in and read or watched through boring parts because there was less options available, now people demand less B.S. and instant value. Because if you don't provide that, there's someone else a click away who will.

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