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.
