If you have ever been a teacher it won’t surprise you to hear that attention spans are getting shorter - and it’s not just young people, it’s all of us. Entertainment and advertising are increasingly produced in tiny fragments, so consumers don’t drift off to watch something else. Curators of museums feel the need to condense their presentations into the shortest possible time span (ten thousand years of history in five minutes). Some radio stations – but not this one – make it a policy never to play more than seven or eight minutes of music without a break. There go all the great symphonies. Writers have learned to write shorter books, and even shorter articles. A British publisher has produced a series of books called “Little Reads,” which give you fifty page excerpts from everything from Tess of the d’Urbevilles to War and Peace. Even radio commentators sometimes find that, as soon as they start to develop an argument, some listeners will start daydreaming.
Are you still with me? Good.
Virtually all the research blames television and the internet for this state of affairs. The evidence is clear: the more young children stare at the flickering screen the more trouble they have keeping their minds on schoolwork, and the more Fs they accumulate. Children with butterfly minds grow up into adults with tiny attention spans.
This makes sense, although I suspect that it is only one factor. Even if we never watch television or play with social media, modern life makes it hard to concentrate on anything. We are too much involved in the neurosis called “multitasking.” Unless we’re doing three things at once we feel we must be “wasting time,” the cardinal sin. Actually, research shows that multitasking doesn’t save time because nothing ever gets our full attention, and so nothing gets done properly and has to be done again. The most common form of multitasking, driving while talking on the phone, can cost you weeks in the hospital, or your whole life.
By contrast imagine an eighteenth century writer – say Jane Austen – working alone in a quiet room in a narrow circle of candlelight. No wonder they could produce such exquisite work, and so much of it. They could really focus on a task. With all our distractions, we find it hard to focus for more than a few minutes, sometimes a few seconds.
The only way to get a message across is by repetition. No matter how inattentive we are, if we hear something often enough we will finally remember it. That’s how advertisers work. If they hit us with a product name and slogan thousands or tens of thousands of times, we will finally reach for that product in the supermarket. That’s how television works. If we see a single television sitcom we might miss the point. If we’ve been watching them closely since the 1950s we know that adults behaving like children and children behaving like adults are supposed to be screamingly funny. That’s how Hollywood works, with endless sequels and remakes of the same movie until the point is absolutely clear. The first Star Wars movie, for example, could have been mistaken for mere space opera. By the time we get to Star Wars VII we have grasped the deeper philosophical meaning of all that zooming about and all those explosions. Even in space there are good guys and bad guys. Ok, we’ve got the message. Can we move to a new galaxy now?
You may have noticed some repetition on this station recently, for which we apologize. It’s just that we’re trying to get a message across, and we do hope you’re paying attention.
Copyright: David Bouchier
