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Social Networks Communications The Internet Science

Global Attention Span Is Narrowing and Trends Don't Last As Long, Study Reveals (theguardian.com) 113

Posted by BeauHD from the reduced-relevancy dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It's just as you suspected; the information age has changed the general attention span. A recently published study from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark suggests the collective global attention span is narrowing due to the amount of information that is presented to the public. Released on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the study shows people now have more things to focus on -- but often focus on things for short periods of time.

The researchers studied several modes of media attention, gathered from several different sources, including (but not limited to): the past 40 years in movie ticket sales; Google books for 100 years; and more modernly, 2013 to 2016 Twitter data; 2010 to 2018 Google Trends; 2010 to 2015 Reddit trends; and 2012 to 2017 Wikipedia attention time. The researchers then created a mathematical model to predict three factors: the "hotness" of the topic, its progression throughout time in the public sphere and the desire for a new topic, said Dr Philipp Hovel, an applied mathematics professor of University College Cork in Ireland. The empirical data found periods where topics would sharply capture widespread attention and promptly lose it just as quickly, except in the cases of publications like Wikipedia and scientific journals. For example, a 2013 Twitter global trend would last for an average of 17.5 hours, contrasted with a 2016 Twitter trend, which would last for only 11.9 hours.
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Global Attention Span Is Narrowing and Trends Don't Last As Long, Study Reveals More

Global Attention Span Is Narrowing and Trends Don't Last As Long, Study Reveals

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  • Huh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by SlaveToTheGrind ( 546262 ) on Thursday April 18, 2019 @10:35PM (#58457944)

    <EOM>

  • In the past (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Thursday April 18, 2019 @10:41PM (#58457966) Journal
    You needed to know how to work and how to study.
    Decades of learning.
    Now you just look it up on the internet.
    Some code example, video, forum will have someone really smart who has done the same in the past. Their result will work.

    • Meh, that's no different than using a library (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday April 18, 2019 @11:11PM (#58458034)
      And if you look at most of the "smart" guys and gals who made it big in the early days of computers they had engineer dads to show them how to do it. Nobody (almost) makes it on their own, bar the occasional freak of nature like Einstein. And trust me, the kids today work their asses off. I've got one in college and her work load is brutal.

      We're all competing for a smaller piece of the pie every year thanks to growing wealth inequality. The pace of economic just can't keep up with it. That means those kids aren't turning to the internet to be lazy, they're doing it for an edge over their peers.

      • And if you look at most of the "smart" guys and gals who made it big in the early days of computers they had engineer dads to show them how to do it. Nobody (almost) makes it on their own, bar the occasional freak of nature like Einstein

        Actually, Einstein had an engineer dad, too. Hermann Einstein was an electrical engineer.

    • You needed to know ... how to study.
      That is unfortunately a lost art, and no longer taught since 40 or 50 years.

      • Yes, you have to learn that yourself today. I did. It's worth it. I know, the school system is kinda detrimental when it comes to that, but it's really rewarding once you notice that indeed you don't learn for school. At least not the things worth learning.

        • Perhaps you should write a book about it then. While there are meanwhile a few books, one more can not hurt. Perhaps your approach fills a niche.

    • Ah yes, cargo-cult programming. The staple of IT security job security.

      More power to you, my friend!

      --signed, your ITSEC department

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Yep, unfortunately the internet also contains a lot of brain-dead examples. So the trick is to figure out which are the good ones and which are the bad ones. Reminds me of a political joke just after Reagan was elected but Carter was still president. They are on horseback with a herd of cows in a paddock. Reagan asks Carter, "How do you know which ones are the Sacred Cows?". Carter grins back, "Ya just have to ask'em, Ron!".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dcw3 ( 649211 )

      "Now you just look it up on the internet. "

      The problem with doing it just this way is that you don't know what you don't know. Frequently, people don't know what they should be looking up.

      Simple example: My daughter is looking for a piece of land to build a home on, and just yesterday gave me two addresses. I looked them up, and told her that one of them wasn't going to work for her because it was zoned for commercial. "What's zoned mean dad?".

    • You needed to know how to work and how to study. Decades of learning.

      Not only that, the reality is people now are losing the ability to focus, because of the constant interruptions, mainly from smartphones.
      When we only had "the internet" to distract us, but getting there meant sitting down at a computer, it wasn't really that bad.
      Now with a constant companion that has social media apps, texts, the internet, games, etc, people are turning into facile drooling blobs.

      AI/machine learning/automation/robots/etc are going to show up just in the nick of time to "manage" human

  • Maybe this is why people seem to be getting dumber (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday April 18, 2019 @10:44PM (#58457972) Journal
    Perhaps?

    • What makes people seem to get dumber is, in my opinion, mostly that people cannot tell fact from fake, and that everyone today can broadcast without a filter due to Twitter, YouTube and the like, whether his message has merit or whether he's talking out of a dark, unpleasant orifice of his own. The problem starts in schools, usually, with many teachers being more concerned with their students simply believing whatever they're being told, even if wrong. Listen and learn is the creed, not question and demand

      • What makes people seem to get dumber is, in my opinion, mostly that people cannot tell fact from fake, and that everyone today can broadcast without a filter due to Twitter, YouTube and the like, whether his message has merit or whether he's talking out of a dark, unpleasant orifice of hin

        The problem starts in schools, usually, with many teachers being more concerned with their students simply believing whatever they're being told, even if wrong. Listen and learn is the creed, not question and demand proof

        Let us not forget that students are often drugged into compliance.

        These people never learn to question. And they would also often not have the required skill set to question sensible, because doubting is only the first step on the road to enlightenment, afterwards comes the hard part: Telling fact from fiction.

        And boy do they get pissed off at someone who does question or doubt. I have always questioned, and it caused me a lot of grief as a young guy, and even as an adult. "Yes men" are a dime a dozen it seems. Now I get rid of sycophants, and get shit done.

        But we aren't selecting for those, and worse, those boys and girls who were on Ritalin are now severely screwed up quasi adults.

        Finding out what is and what is not is anything but easy, mostly because it requires understanding what you are being told. And that has the unpleasant side requirement to learn something.

        Now I see what my problem is! Even as a kid, I read the encyclo

        • Imagine what it's like in a catholic school...

          It was 4 long years. For me, and for the teachers.

          • Imagine what it's like in a catholic school...

            It was 4 long years. For me, and for the teachers.

            Ah yes - I remember when 9th grade happened, and all the Kids that went to Catholic school were released into the wilds of public school. Talk about cutting loose!

            All that repression for all those years, and now showtime. The boys were great for foul mouthed cutting up fun, and us heathens always tried to get one of the Catholic girls as steady's. Hilarity, and much naughtiness ensued.

    • No, people seem to be getting dumber to you because you're becoming a crotchety old man. More cynical, less full of hope, more critical. You've been burned too many times and it's taking it's toll. It's just part of getting old.

      There were plenty of idiots back in the neolithic era when you were a young lad, but all those little daily examples get lost to time. Selection bias in your memory. You probably also don't remember all the times you wiped your ass. Because why would you remember that? But logically

      • LOL, I'm not reading all that! xD
        You sound bitter and angry. Maybe you should take a step back from the Internets for a while, I think you're taking it too seriously. xD

        • "I'm not reading all that!" Follows up with criticism of what he didn't read... Oh right, there's a reason we make an effort to ignore crotchety old windbags.

    • 2,500 years ago Plato complained that people were getting dumber since they would no longer memorize the classics, instead they would just read them whenever they wanted to refer to them.

      Not only are people not getting dumber, it's not even novel to falsely complain that they are getting dumber.

  • Alternative theory (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Because people don't care, trends aren't interesting and once you realize you are wasting your time on stupid shit you move on. A shorter life time of a trend could just mean our filters for crap got better, not that our attention span diminished.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Mayvbe the pr people now know exactly what buttons to push to make the trends, and they want them to change faster as change usually means moving product, and that is what they are payed for, You may of course be right, and I might be full of sh.. oh well I hope you'll have a nice day

  • Maxwell's Demon: when attention tends toward zero (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GearheadShemTov ( 208950 ) on Thursday April 18, 2019 @11:05PM (#58458022)

    We've heard much talk about the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much ever since the first Persian Gulf war, nearly thirty years. Back then folks used to laugh at the idea of posting newsworthy things to list servers, it being a fact Known By Everyone that the radio and television media would always have the latest news.

    But now social media has gotten so far inside that 24-hour news cycle, should we be surprised attention to individual stories decays so quickly? In this regime of information overload, each story behaves more like a few molecules of air colliding than a whole thunderstorm, so much so that all the contradictory stories begin to cancel out, on average, and what we are left with is the much more slowly changing reality of the physical world. In other words, all these micro-trends become a gas—a chaos, as the word 'gas' derives from.

    Trying to discern anything useful about the world from obsessing over these micro-trends is akin to Maxwell's Demon attempting to sort the fast from the slow molecules in an attempt to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

    Perhaps we might eventually come up with an Ideal News Law analogous to the Ideal Gas Law, though I have no clue what the analogous properties of temperature, volume, and pressure would be for news dynamics. Naturally, this all about hot air.

    • not sarcasm: this is the best goddamn Slashdot comment I've ever read

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      The internet, just because the attention span is short does not mean it wont come back with a vengeance. There might be a whole lot out there but it's really hard to make it disappear, so what thousands find and forget about today, millions can discover and scream about tomorrow.

      It's like a glorious every changing pattern of attention, of change of focus, of altered reactions, of representation of the same information, all ebbing and flowing, with focal points of attention and reaction, all setting off new

  • TL;DR (Score:4, Funny)

    by mschaffer ( 97223 ) on Thursday April 18, 2019 @11:25PM (#58458044)

    That summary was waaaaay to long.

  • the information age has changed the general attention span. A recently published study [this is when I scrolled down]

  • Knowledge retention is part of that.

    So we're simultaneously getting dumber and able to use acquired knowledge.

  • In other words, patience for items of questionable value is decreasing (or people are smarter and judge whether the stuff is relevant more quickly). And apathetic interest is spreading more globally, especially when there's ample opportunity to consider something else as being potentially more worthwhile (or relevant) than what is currently presented. With the Kardashian generation, the desire to tune-out of media content that does not resonate with self is inevitably going to occur at a greater clip... a

  • The summary above couldn't hold my attention enough for me to read more than maybe a quarter of it...

  • "Released on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the study shows people now have more things to focus on -- but often focus on things for short periods of time".

    Released on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the study shows people now have more things to focus on -- THEREFORE often focus on things for short periods of time.

    FTFH

  • "The empirical data found periods where topics would sharply capture widespread attention and promptly lose it just as quickly, except in the cases of publications like Wikipedia and scientific journals. For example, a 2013 Twitter global trend would last for an average of 17.5 hours, contrasted with a 2016 Twitter trend, which would last for only 11.9 hours."

    Attention spans for wikipedia and scientific works were not impacted, only fluf on twitter and other social media. I see nothing wrong with this, 17,5

  • Shorter periods of focus means the bouncing ball of attention span gets whacked around more frequently. Combined with the documented [livescience.com] inability [npr.org] of humans [psychologytoday.com] to multi-task effectively [scienceabc.com], mean much less work gets done.

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