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Attention Spans
ATTENTION SPANS....Mike O'Hare is unhappy about decreasing attention spans and what that means for the news business. I couldn't quite make it through his entire post1, but here's his conclusion:
Maybe a workable business/technology model can be created for digital newspapers, but the newspaper itself cannot be the same as the once-a-day package of lots of long stories and a 'readership' of googlers and texters may just not support the journalism on which a democracy depends.
....I am quite down about all this. It drives me nuts that my students have almost never engaged with a work of art or explication for more than the length of a music video; I assign them one of Wagner's longer operas and their mental state becomes a little labile, understandably, but even a ninety-minute class discussion often pushes the new limits of attention. I don't know how to get our arms around the facts of declining-marginal-cost goods in three-minute blips.
My mother was a fourth-grade teacher, and she told me once that when she started teaching (circa 1970) she could schedule activities for a maximum of 30 minutes before the kids got too antsy to control. By the time she retired (circa 2000), that was down to 15 minutes. I've long been of the opinion that there's an upside to this (primarily a better ability to multitask), but I confess that I'm less and less sure of that these days.
1Just a wee joke.
He might be right. He might be wrong. Haven't got time to think about all this. Gotta go.
:)
OOPS!!! Sorry, Kevin. What's that you were sayin'?
It would be interesting to know how many of your readers, like me, are reading your blog at work, during brief "breaks?" I suspect it's a large number, and that if a cure for ADD is ever found it will be bad news for your blog.
it's cuz most things aren't interesting enough to listen about for more than about 10 minutes. TED covered this a month ago. opera is boring? whoda thunk it?
Each generation reshapes many social (and other) norms. No use geting 2 worked up cuz dem's da facts.
I do think some of the discussion/debate about if the changes in the most recent generations are more profound is interesting to follow. Peers, parents, chemicals, technology,all? Who knows....yet.
Multitasking is one of those things that no one does well, even those young folks who JUST KNOW they can multitask without any problem at all. Hence the attention span to each task shortens, the task is done more poorly, and so forth and so on.
You may, if you wish, look up research on this. I heard a funny story on NPR the other day about students multitasking and how they knew they were doing just fine with their homework and their studies, but their real attention was on their IMs, and they were not learning very well. The really bright students got by on being bright.
This happened to my nephew, who went to Emory Riddle and thought he could just be bright and all would come to him. He had to drop out...and go to a state school
mutlitasking is greatly overrated. focus is vastly underrated.
i neither insist nor expect that everyone be able to muster the concentration needed to read kant's "critique of pure reason" but it would be a sad commentary on the nature of our progress as a civilization if no one could. in a deep sense, allowing our expectations to diminish to the point that we cannot expect the coming generation to have more than tens of seconds of concentration would be elitist in a way hardly contemplable for centuries. not since the days when literacy was only for a privileged elite has such a division of the members of our culture been possible.
this is an incredibly serious situation, mr. drum.
American children will soon have very long attention spans. They will last about twelve hours, but will include a 30 minute break for lunch and two 10 minute bathroom breaks.
I don't know which is worse; that you tell a groaner of a joke, or that you have to explain it's a joke.
But than, what should I expect from a Lakers fan.
As an aside, I find that I can not hold my group's attention for no more than 45 minutes. Has been like that since 1996.
I noticed declining student attention span during the time I taught University level chemistry and thermodynamics. In 1989 you could get maybe 35 minutes. By 2000 this had dropped to 15 minutes. That was for general chemistry or chemistry for liberal farts majors. Interesting though, kids paid attention to me the full 50 minute lecture time for thermodynamics. I think that the reason for this is logical however, since I used to suggest to the class that hmmm this would make an interesting exam question wouldn't it.
Come on now, I know for a fact that the attention span for brutality and sex is almost unending-then there's video games and phone texting that teens can do for unlimited time limits. The problem is that our schools are in the dark ages and to quote the teens-Boring!In all seriousness, it has been recommended by serious and up to date educators that 11th and 12th. grades be eliminated in favor of Community and Junior College Courses that actually challenge the teens and allow them to pursue their own interests at a level that they can cope with. Electronics and Mechanics should be offered to the non-college bound students and their interests would also peak...Thus says retired teacher who knew when to retire. I know kids that can't spell but can they put an electrical box in a home or fix a car-Think about it!
Weenie: liberal farts majors
Ahem. I resemble that remark.
It's interesting that these comments put all the blame on the quality of the reader, and none on the quality of the writing.
Is it possible that most newspaper articles have always been rambling crap that does nothing but repeat conventional narratives, but people read them anyway because they had no choice? In the era of the internet, people can now read the first paragraph, see that the author has no new insights, and just move on. Call that "short attention span" if you want. I call it shopping around aggressively for better content.
As a relatively young person and a corporate trainer can i just say that this is the newest iteration of the oldest canard in the book "what's wrong with young people nowadays." I hate generational bashing, especially when study after study has shown that kids today are smarter, more adaptable, and more social than their parents and grandparents. Stupid trivia polls don't count, by the way, as evidence to the contrary.
Where's the evidence that attention spans are shortening and that the anecdotes above don't stem from ossification of teaching methods that made learning more and more boring? I routinely give eight hour plus training sessions, and attention is never a problem and I tend to work with people in their early to late twenties. But we do sensible things, like keeping it active, engaging multiple senses, and taking frequent breaks.
How you can expect someone to pay attention to you as you read from books about a subject they could care less about is beyond me.
Josh has a point. There must be some nonanecdotal evidence out there. You can't really trust the rosy memories of teachers of years bygone. On the other hand a generation (like for instance my nephew, the one with progressive parents) who spent thousands of hours blowing up stuff on a big screen TV or computer has got to be different from a generation (me) who read books with a flashlight under the covers after bedtime.
The argument that kids today have no attention spans has a serious obstacle to overcome in that obviously some activities kids have amazingly long attention spans for. Try to pull a kid off of a video game, or to put down that Harry Potter book.
There is just more competition for kids' attention now, and more diversity in their interests. Video games and other media are getting more and more sophisticated in the techniques they use to pull in kids and keep them captivated.
Are our teacher lessons also getting more sophisticated, or are we expecting todays kids to be just as interested in them as kids in the past who had less interesting alternatives for their attention?
optical weenie: kids paid attention to me the full 50 minute lecture time for thermodynamics
Paying attention? Sleeping with your eyes closed is more like it. All the fascinating physics subjects there are (including optics) and you pick thermo? Ugh.
My undergrad thermo class was the 2nd two hour lecture in a row during night school. I had a teacher who would have spoken in a monotone even if you lit a fire under his ass (good idea for thermo, huh?).
Ok, classical thermo has its uses, but so does cleaning cesspools. That doesn't mean anyone has to like it.
There are some vital jobs (think neurosurgery or submarine espionage) that require incessant focus for 6, 8, or 10 hours, or longer. I certainly couldn't do that, and I'm from the early Jurassic when attention spans were (anecdotally) longer. Hopefully there are enough "outliers" in the long-time end of the attention span distribution curve to keep populating these demanding jobs.
American children will soon have very long attention spans. They will last about twelve hours, but will include a 30 minute break for lunch and two 10 minute bathroom breaks???
Wagner's longer operas? Well, in my year in Italy (1979-1980) I took in an uncut performance of Goetterdaemmerung, which I believe is Wagner's longest opera, with the remarkable octagenarian Lovro von Matacic conducting (which means the Rome Opera Orchestra wasn't its frequently sloppy self).
One of my fellow opera goers up in the cheap seats was a baby -- not a child, but an actual babe in arms, who cried a bit when the lights dimmed but otherwise made it through the whole five plus hours without much more napping than the rest of the audience.
Don't make 'em like they used to. One of my own kids started going to the opera at the age of two and had no problems (except with rude audience members who had apparently never seen a child before), while the other has never made it through a complete performance.
As to focus vs. multi-tasking... I've developed software for 30 years and the transition has been astonishing. Small autonomous teams working through problems together had been prevalent. Today there are thinkers and doers. One person does all the thinking and without sharing the ins and outs relegates minute tasks to those without much overview. All of this because of increased pressures to perform but it has a way of coming back to bite those who rely on that style of management too much in the arse.
So in some ways there are rewards for being satisfied with one's short attention span.
If all that IM lust could be channeled...
I'm still wondering when this Golden Age of Long Attention Spans occurred. People in Shakespeare's time couldn't sit still for an entire play--what's changed, really?
Just chiming in with the other people who mentioned video games. Video games take hours to finish, in the 30 to 60 hour range for your average sandbox game or RPG, probably less for shooters but still in the hours. Presumably some of the same kids who can't sit through Wagner have the ability to play through a much longer video game. What this suggests I don't know, other than there is a very lengthy medium that kids these days do have the attention span for.
There is nothing like survival to increase an attention span. A detailed knowledge of the environment used to be necessary for the survival of Native Americans. I remember reading that in the old days Native American boys were placed by a fresh pile of scat and told to watch it as if their life depended on it. They would sit patiently for hours and observe as the scat grew older and fell apart. They would observe the scat of various animals in varying conditions over the course of their education. Later when they would encounter the droppings of an animal they could confidently and correctly report the type of animal, its approximate age and health, what it had been eating and how long it had been since the animal defecated. All important information for any hunter. The would do the same for animal tracks and a whole range of similar signs concerning not just animals but also the local vegetation and weather. Their lives and the lives of their loved ones depended on the knowledge gained from watching animal dropping, leaves and tracks fall apart. Their lives depended on knowledge gained from hours of intense observation. Boys with short attention spans died prematurely.
We modern Americans don't have the same need to learn through intense observation of the environment. Today when people go into the woods to hunt they are engaging in a "sport." If they are not successful nobody starves.
In the modern work place we have automated many of the jobs requiring an extended attention span.
I don't believe the human ability to focus on a single object over an extended period of time has gone away. It just isn't as necessary in our modern world. Few are rewarded for their ability to focus on the same problem for more than a few minutes at a time.
The Economist magazine had an article several years ago about why specialists at keeping social contacts are well rewarded in today's economy. The ability to deal with all kinds of people using many different mediums was considered a valuable skill.
Forgive me if I seem unconcerned about the imminent collapse of civilization as we know it, but has anyone considered the possibility that the teachers complaining about how kids don't pay attention nowadays might just be ... well ... BORING? I mean, honestly, go all the way back to Roman times, and you will find boring old farts complaining that kids don't listen to their elders anymore.
Could you just give us the Readers Digest version of this story? I'm falling asleep here.
I notice Kevin's attempt to pre-empt the lame jokes failed. Maybe people didn't read all the way to the footnote.
I think the problem could be recast by saying the number of subjects that can inspire rapt and unpaid attention has certainly declined. I taught English as a second language in Italy for several years and always found a direct correspondence between concentration and need. This did not have any connection that I could see to the age of the student.
she told me once that when she started teaching (circa 1970) she could schedule activities for a maximum of 30 minutes before the kids got too antsy to control. By the time she retired (circa 2000), that was down to 15 minutes.
All depends on what activities you have them do, doesn't it? My 5-year old nephew has an attention span of zero -- until he gets into a game he invented, or until he climbs behind a computer game, and suddenly his focus is total and extended.
I doubt he'll be very good at listening to a teacher speak for an extended amount of time, but give him an educational computer game and I'm sure he'll learn fast.
"It's interesting that these comments put all the blame on the quality of the reader, and none on the quality of the writing.
Is it possible that most newspaper articles have always been rambling crap that does nothing but repeat conventional narratives, but people read them anyway because they had no choice? In the era of the internet, people can now read the first paragraph, see that the author has no new insights, and just move on. Call that "short attention span" if you want. I call it shopping around aggressively for better content."
Yes. 90% of anything is shit and now that people have more options, they sensibly move on to more interesting and relevant uses of their time.
I can virtually predict what any Nation or National Review article is going to say about one paragraph in, so I don't bother reading that shit- I've already gotten the point and move on.
A skilled writer or teacher can make any topic interesting. However, many writers and teachers are either mediocre or using needlessly pompous language and stone-age pedagogy, so hence the hand-wringing about Kids These Days.
When people had nothing to do during the Winter but hunker down until Spring with only a couple books then by golly those books needed to be long and wordy and slow.
The human brain is capable of remarkable adaptations and flexibility. My parent's brains are slowing down, but that is mostly due to lack of stimulation. They no longer exercise their brains.
I know for a fact that my memory improved greatly when I was forced to learn a very large role in a play. By the end of my grueling ordeal I could memorize things about five times faster than at the start.
Don't worry - the ability is still there, it is just not currently needed, that's all.
Speaking just about education, I observe that older professors at University--and these are good lecturers--have what I call a "classical" style. They begin their lecture with a brief overview going back to the Greeks ("Aristotle said...") then structure an argument over the 50-minute class period. At the end, right before the end of the hour, they go back and summarize what they were talking about having made their argument. These lectures are a thing of beauty, but they makes demands on the listener.
Younger professors use what I call a commercial TV structure: Brief welcome & review of the last lecture, then four or five cycles of a 5-10 minute information chunk followed by a 2-3 minute activity or interlude, until the end of the class period. This style typically has a snappier pace but it covers the same amount of information more or less. The listener doesn't have to remember the introductory argument over a 50 minute span.
You can attribute the difference on the decline of attention, but I don't think people have lost the ability to concentrate, per se. Rather, in our media-saturated culture many people--especially uneducated people--have an automatic, unconscious expectation that all life is about being entertained & aroused, and if you are not being entertained right now then something is wrong with the source who is not entertaining to you. This may be the first thing that students who succeed in college learn, that they have to concentrate.
Anyhow, imho, what appears to be a decline of attention is a side-effect of handing our culture over to commercial media whose primary goal is to sell product.
PTate,
I respectfully disagree. You are making a moral judgment.
I assert that the apparent decline in attention span may be slightly due to the media but it is more due to the demands of the extremely fast paced jobs we have.
Seriously. Who gets hired for being able to sit and ponder for two hours? It is all more, quicker, faster, more, and more.
I know it is cool to blame MTV but movie videos are so 80s. Instead look to how we earn a living today.
When I spent a Spring as an elementary school substitute teacher, I found out the group activities listed in the teacher's lesson plan for that day always ended up in chaos. Children were supposed to be left to be self-managed in small groups to complete group projects. I soon scrapped these teachers' lesson plans for group activities and instead gave college like lectures on the material in the plan, making the students copy the outline or equations I made on the chalk board as if they were taking notes from a lecture. This strategy greatly improved class discipline and the children had no trouble writing notes. Their only question was what to do with the lecture notes.
Video games take hours to finish, in the 30 to 60 hour range for your average sandbox game or RPG
Absolutely correct. As a guy in his 40s, I've discovered I don't have the attention span to play a video game. Seriously. Have you tried playing a modern game all the way to the conclusion? I've only done it twice (Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts); normally I run out of patience.
Mark,
Heh heh. The day they have good video games in the nursing home is the day I'll consider going. My local senior citizen center, which accepts people as young as 50, asked how to get more of the young 50 year olds to come in. I told them they needed to allow time on their networked classroom computers to have a LAN party. I was serious.
Tripp: "You are making a moral judgment."
TV has a certain structure--cycles of content/commercial--and it is a moral judgment to observe that watching TV for hours a day may affect how individuals think?
Isn't this the old correlation does not equal causation thing? Perhaps our jobs have become increasingly fast-paced and full of interruptions because we have grown accustomed to pacing that consists of frequent commercial interruptions and quick cuts.
But I agree that the sheer quantity of information available to us through the internet forces us to pick up the pace and multitask. It certainly has affected my work. I even find myself resenting those flash-based websites that fade in artistically while loading. Jeez, those six seconds, what a waste of my time.
Thirty years ago there was a test that teachers could give to their students that consisted of a list of questions to answer, like What is the capital of California?, or What is 3x12 minus 16?
But, the directions at the top told the students to read all of the questions FIRST before answering. The last question said, Skip all the above questions, sign your name and hand in your paper.
It was amazing how many students failed to follow directions and read all the questions first.
PTate,
The moral judgment comes in when you label the effect as 'bad.' And I don't know about you but I know for a fact who is telling me I must work quicker, faster, more and more, and it ain't the media.
I'm a teacher (high school) who regularly teaches a 70 minutes class with no problems in attention span. While I'd love to assert that my students are extra smart or that my teaching is extra amazing, I think that the truth is that this is just a trojan horse of an argument. Attention spans are fine. The world is changing and people seek their news in different ways. Newspapers must adjust to this just like the rest of us.