For your reading pleasure:
The Attention Span Myth
by Virginia Heffernan
New York Times Magazine (Nov. 19, 2010)
“And so polemicists of various stripes continue to calibrate the effect of technology on attention spans. But I’m surprised that anyone ventures so far into this thicket of sophistry. I get stuck much earlier in the equation. Everyone has an attention span: really? And really again: an attention span is a freestanding entity like a boxer’s reach, existing independently of any newspaper or chess game that might engage or repel it, and which might be measured by the psychologist’s equivalent of a tailor’s tape?”
I love this article. I’ve long observed that kids’ attention spans are generally longer than adults and yet people often say the opposite. Try keeping adult attention on a topic for a day, a speech, a 40-80 minute classroom period! It is such an individual thing.
Stephen
(And yes I haven’t started my shopping yet.)
One Response
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
“It is such an individual thing.” Indeed …
“In trotting out the strawman of a fixed attention span, Heffernan obfuscates a whole array of interesting, complicated, and important questions. Central to those questions is the fact that “attentiveness” takes many forms. One can, for instance, be attentive to rapid-paced changes in the environment, a form of attentiveness characterized by quick, deliberate shifts in focus. As Lehrer and others have described, there is evidence that video gaming can enhance this kind of attentiveness. There is a very different form of attentiveness that involves filtering out, or ignoring, environmental stimuli in order to focus steadily on one thing – reading a long book, say, or repairing a watch. Our capacity for this kind of sustained attention is being eroded, I argue, by the streams of enticing info-bits pouring out of our networked gadgets.”
From Carr, “Yes, Virginia, there is attentiveness”. http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/11/yes_virginia_th.php