The notorious 8-second, worse-than-a-goldfish Attention Span
If you have googled about reducing attention span, chances are that you have stumbled upon the fact that humans now have a lesser attention span than Goldfishes. And the likelihood of you believing the fact is also high since you might have read this ‘Microsoft study’ from a well-established news source such as Times Magazine, The Guardian or The Hindu for example.
The report starts with a quote from Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella that Human attention, not computational power is becoming a scarce resource. Herbert Simon’s “Wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” also marks the pages.
It states that since 2000, humans attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds — which is less than a goldfish's 9-second attention span. The researchers suggest that focus and attention span correlates with social media usage, media consumption, tech-savviness and multi-screen usage. They also add that social media users and early tech adapters particularly have shorter bursts of high attention. It is said that the dopamine release from the sense of newness and achievement could lead people to get hooked on shorter bites of information.
Digital giants seem to have acted upon this and it is evident in the face of quick entertainments such as TikTok, Netflix Quick laughs, Instagram reels and Youtube Shorts. According to the report by The Guardian, is said that the shelf life of trending topics on Twitter is also reducing indicating that we are becoming more and more impatient as a species. But is it a paradox that we live in times when we can binge-watch entire series the whole night but are said to have only 8 seconds of attention span?
It is also important to remember that the above mentioned digital products take a significant amount of our daily lives. Consider this Statista report that suggests half of us spend 5 hours or more on the smartphone for non-work-related matters. Moreover, this Live-mint report suggests Indians’ screen time has increased 25% to 7 hours per day for work, study, entertainment uses amongst others.
In some way, the same Digital and Technology industry has succeeded in keeping us hooked to a small gadget for such long periods. This BCC article conducts a much deeper look into this issue and many experts do not seem to accept the 8-second metric. It is unsure as to how the number was arrived at. Similarly, the data around the shelf-life of trending topics is also quite vague.
So before concluding that in 15 years, technology has made our attention span worse off than that of a goldfish, it is important to consider other influential factors such as the environment we find ourselves in, the kind of task we are involved in etc.
It is time to examine alternative human elements (such as memory retention, sense of reward) other than just attention that leads to the monumental popularity of smaller bites of content such as TikToks, Instagram reels and such.
