
The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter - myinnerbanjo
https://onezero.medium.com/the-global-attention-span-is-getting-shorter-ee652a7e09b8
======
colmvp
I think it's telling that those in tech, including billionaire execs like
Jobs, were/are very sensitive to the usage of tech devices by their kids.
Addiction to games, news, apps, entertainment is real, but that's only half
the issue. It fosters this itch where we can't linger on uncomfortable
thoughts without instinctively grabbing our phone to be distracted. This
include when we're trying to really go deep on a subject matter that could
take a long time to grok.

I credit a lot of changes I made over the last few years to courses like
Learning How to Learn (Oakley, Sejnowski) and books like Deep Work (Newport)
and Mastery (Greene) in helping to bring me back to realize the importance of
uninterrupted blocks of hard, focused work. That coupled with moments of quiet
time away from devices so that I can let my mind kind of just wander and
process life has made life actually more fulfilling.

I quit Facebook, Twitter, and only check Instagram once every few days. I'm
not totally 'clean' since I'll still spend time on YouTube and Reddit during
moments of frustration, but I think it's important not to beat oneself up when
one 'cheats.' After all, it's not completely a new phenomenon. There's always
been things like books, newspapers, TV, radio to distract our attention.

But maybe it just feels a bit different since some of the smartest people in
the world are working everyday to make sure we're looking at the thing they're
working on in a very calculated fashion. That plus the fact that sometimes it
feels like you're supposed to know so much of what's going on in the world and
environment around you. But really, so many topics are so much more
complicated than a simple cursory look that it feels kind of fruitless to jump
into it when it realistically takes hundreds of hours to truly understand it.

~~~
sandworm101
Remember too that many billionaires are control freaks. Them policing their
children's screen time may just be part of larger control regime. Lots of rich
people, going back to most every king/queen in history, have been what we
would today call overprotective parents. Tech royalty isn't any different.

~~~
chrinic83a7
> Remember too that many billionaires are control freaks. Them policing their
> children's screen time may just be part of larger control regime. Lots of
> rich people, going back to most every king/queen in history, have been what
> we would today call overprotective parents. Tech royalty isn't any
> different.

Whether this is the cause or not, children of the rich do very well in life,
regardless of the level of control freak

~~~
KitDuncan
They are doing well, because they have resources that 99.99% of humans never
will have. It's very hard to draw any conclusions here.

~~~
miemo
> They are doing well, because...

you just drew a big one

~~~
TeMPOraL
Still, what's more likely? Rich children doing better because of
overcontrolling parents, or doing better because they have access to enough
resources to resolve almost any difficulty they face in their lives?

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CM30
I agree with the sentiment, but the methodology here seems suspect to say the
least.

I mean, in their own words:

> The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion tweets and analyzed the top 50
> trending hashtags in the world every hour on the hour, from 2013 to 2016.
> They then calculated the time the hashtags remained popular and found that
> in 2013, a hashtag remained in the top 50 list for an average of 17.5 hours,
> but the figure had dropped to 11.9 hours by 2016.

It's based on how long a hashtag stays popular on Twitter.

That's not a good source of data for something like this. For one thing, it's
bloody Twitter, a service where topics change very rapidly and posts are at
most 280 characters long.

Not exactly an environment conductive to deep thinking or lengthy session
times.

Secondly, it doesn't really show attention span declining as much as it does
the over saturation of media nowadays. New stuff is coming out all the time
now, whether its news, movies, games, TV shows, music, books or anything else.
There's just more to discuss, and less time to discuss it.

Hell, in games alone, we're approaching E3 right now. In that timeframe, it's
likely at least 100 new games will be announced across systems, and many more
will have new trailers, concept art, fact sheets and other info released.

Popular hashtags on Twitter for games will probably change every few minutes
as a result.

This research just showed that when more stuff is released/documented, popular
topics change rapidly day in and day out.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup. Hashtag popularity period is basically proxy for growth of a) Twitter and
b) world around it.

That said, maybe the (perception of) shortening attention span is also just a
proxy for growth.

------
nicklaf
(First, this article is _not_ about individual attention span: it's about an
increase in volume of content and the consequently dwindling amount of time
the _collective_ public has to dwell on a given piece of published content.)

Anyway, this brings to mind one good thing about Hacker News: while breaking
stories make it to the front page, so does older content worthy of discussion.
We need more people to care about curation of what might otherwise be
forgotten.

~~~
wallace_f
>good thing about Hacker News: while breaking stories make it to the front
page, so does older content worthy of discussion.

Yea, I also trust a democracy of people to highlight what's important or
interesting more than corporate news. Or at least, as a complement to it.

~~~
asdff
I don't know that HN is a democracy at all. I tried submitting an article, and
the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never
saw the light of day.

I guess having a check like that is a good thing. Take reddit for example,
people usually post third hand articles because the primary source is probably
a paywalled article from a proper journalism outlet, and posts are subjected
to sweeping vote manipulation. It's not a cultural cross section either, the
types of people who post on reddit are a vast minority; I wouldn't be suprised
if it was less than 5% of users. And users of sites like reddit/HN are not
representative at all of the country or the world really. These sites heavily
skew towards the educated, high income, male, and white, so you miss out on a
lot of valuable perspective if you only use these sorts of sites.

~~~
grzm
> _" I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my
> behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day."_

I haven't observed behavior like this. HN does have dedupe behavior that
prevents the same piece being submitted multiple times within some time frame.
How this looks to the duplicate submitter is that upon clicking "submit",
rather than creating a new submission, it redirects you to original. This
_could_ appear that it's getting submitted by some other account, but isn't
what actually happened.

------
basetop
This article really isn't saying attention span is getting shorter ( or it's
misunderstanding what "attention span" means ). It's that global interest
timeframe is getting shorter ( aka how long a product or news is relevant is
shrinking because we are getting more product, news, etc ).

"The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion tweets and analyzed the top 50
trending hashtags in the world every hour on the hour, from 2013 to 2016. They
then calculated the time the hashtags remained popular and found that in 2013,
a hashtag remained in the top 50 list for an average of 17.5 hours, but the
figure had dropped to 11.9 hours by 2016."

This doesn't mean that attention span is shrinking. It just means that there
are tons more tweets and hashtags in 2016 as there are in 2013.

Just like with movies, the article mentioned. It has nothing to do with
"attention span" since Endgame is a 3 hour long film. It just means that the
movie industry is producing a lot more movies/blockbusters and the time a
blockbluster can stay at the top is limited because another blockbuster is
bound to release soon after.

It's like in the past we only had the "classics" as college subjects. Now we
have physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, etc. And the new subjects
means that our attention span got shorter. Which is absurd.

I think human attention span got shorter, but the article isn't really arguing
that or it isn't arguing it well. And I'm not sure if human attention span
getting shorter is necessarily a bad thing. Why sit through commercials,
intros and so much filler/fluff in most media? As long as you are able to
concentrate on things that deserve concentration, nothing wrong with short
attention span for fluff.

~~~
asdff
I think its ridiculous hyperbole to call this a global phenomenon if they are
looking at tweets. Less than a quarter of Americans use the site, a proportion
that skews educated/wealthy/white, and of all twitter users something like 8%
of accounts are responsible for 80% of tweets.

So why is so much being written and thought and discussed about whats really
just the rampant spam of maybe 2% of Americans? Probably because twitter has a
ticker.

------
btrettel
> In the scientific world, he says, it may be risky if researchers actively
> choose to study trendy topics that hit the headlines, but aren’t as
> important as other pressing issues that demand more time and effort.

I think scientific research has had its own trends for a long time now, though
they probably are more local than what the author is writing about.

I can recall a conversation I had with an acquaintance at an APS fluid
dynamics conference last year about how trendy the broad field of fluid
dynamics can be. 5 years ago it was all about "dynamic mode decomposition"
(which hasn't died yet but is on the wane) and now it's machine learning.

You can be confident a-priori that most machine learning studies in fluid
dynamics aren't going to do much of value because their "training data" is
deficient in some way, whether the number of data points or the variation of
an important variable. (There are other problems as well but that one seems
most accessible to HN folks.) These more fundamental issues are not well
appreciated, probably because they are hard and not sexy.

It's a lot easier and more exciting to try $buzzword for $X. (If you've missed
the trend you always could try comparing $buzzwordA and $buzzwordB for $X. One
talk at a conference I'm going to next week fits this template!)

------
mrhappyunhappy
It doesn’t help that everything is now a landing page, people must be able to
skim through. Long text is bad! Must convert to customer!

The internet has been commercialized to the point where it’s no longer
exciting to browse. I stay on HN and mostly read reactions to posts without
opening the post link.

------
johnvega
[https://humanetech.com/](https://humanetech.com/)

Attention economy unintentionally promotes "human downgrading"

Great opportunity to innovate on apps and services that promotes reversal of
human downgrading.

~~~
spinach
Is this sarcasm?

Else... The answer is less apps and device time. Even having an app to help
with 'human downgrading' takes up brainspace and a lingering attachment to the
screen and devices. Though I suppose since screentime/devices aren't going
away any time soon might as well try to mitigate it a bit.

~~~
jonnydubowsky
I spent some time on their website and found humanetech's strategy to be well
thought out. They aren't promoting an app, but rather a "combination of
thought leadership, pressure, and inspiration to create market demand and
momentum for products and services based on Humane Technology principles".

Sitting back and doing nothing or promoting just using less technology doesn't
really address the runaway train that many feel they are on. If they are able
to actually effect any of the 1000 or so people who are positioned to make
changes to these products, then it may make a dent.

[https://humanetech.com/problem/#the-way-
forward](https://humanetech.com/problem/#the-way-forward)

------
jcims
Just watch the intro to an old movie or sitcom that you can remember from back
in the day.

~~~
quotz
Haha why?

~~~
gwilkes
In case this is a serious question and not a joke (unclear which it is) then
he may be saying that older movies and shows had these longer intros that
seemed normal at the time, but if you watch them again now they seem long and
boring now. So that is one to show how your attention span has become shorter

~~~
jcims
That’s exactly what I was getting at... The best is watching it with your
kids...they can’t take it lol.

~~~
tyfon
Meanwhile, in Norway, slow tv [1] is quite popular.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television)

------
cletus
So, another day, another crappy analysis.

First, time in the top 50 tags is shorter in 2016 than 2013. Ok, but what
increase in volume of tweets was there? How many more tags? If you have 1M
tags vs 10M with a fixed top N (where N=50) and even though N is relatively
small in comparison to the tool so we're talking real outliers, I think you'll
find that absent any other differences time in the top 50 will decrease.

Second, why are we talking about "attention" with Twitter as our basis for
comparison? The very nature of the platform is people saying shallow but
catchy things who like the sound of their own voice finding an echo chamber to
assert their personal identities by RTing said tweet. In what world was or is
Twitter a forum for any kind of attention let alone debate?

Third, catchy phrases in books. Um... there is a long lead time between
writing a book, having it published and getting it in the hands of people. Now
you can get a tweet out to 100M people in several seconds.

Holding people accountable. Ok, good, something worth talking about. If we've
learned nothing from the Trump presidency it's this: there's only so much
outrage you can hold on to and every day there's another story about lying,
some scandal, fanning the flames of racists who have never gotten over losing
the ability to own people, etc and one story just drowns out the previous one.
I'm honestly not sure how you deal with this problem but it's a big one.

As for seeking journalism with more background research and quality, it's been
tried. People don't want it and, more importantly, they're not willing to pay
for it. You also have media conglomerates who pose as "journalists" who are
anything but. Like, oh I don't know, anything owned by a Murdoch.

The conclusion seems shallow. I'll just leave it at that.

I actually see this as a fundamental problem of human nature. Humans are
inherently... tribal. We naturally stick to people like ourselves, culturally
and even physically. That sense of belonging is a key part of social
structure. Dan Carlin talks about this in his Hardcore History series on WWI
(a 6 part series--30+ hours of content--called A Blueprint for Armageddon
which is totally worth listening to) when he talks about the Armenian
genocide. His point is that pretty much everyone is guilty of genocide in
history. Not that that excuses it but we shouldn't make out that any
particular example is an exception or something that we ourselves (or, rather,
our ancestors) weren't guilty of.

What happened in Europe after the Renaissance was the idea formed of nation
states. While this might've been loosely associated with some tribal identity,
in time it transcended it and it resulted in a number of revolutions deposing
an old order that was typically a monarchy: French, American, Russian to name
3.

Because this is what many of us grew up with I think we consider this normal
but I question this assumption. It seems like it's more of an exception than
the norm. Many say the US is increasingly polarized and there's a clash of
cultures. While I won't disagree with that, maybe this is simply the people
reverting to a more natural state of tribal loyalty. It seems like it's easy
to fan these flames as many opportunists have and will.

So perhaps it's better to say that social media makes it easier for people to
live in bubbles that affirm their own world views. And I think Twitter is
largely irrelevant in all this.

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bobblywobbles
Totally agree.

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secfirstmd
Good point, as I was reading this it struck me that

