This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on April 16th, 2024.
Research establishes that for most people, attention spans have greatly shrunk in the past few decades. For clarity in terms, attention span is the length of time one can focus on the subject matter or a task before being distracted.
This decline calls for alarm, especially because chances of getting back where people were three or four decades ago are minimal. It is rather left for us to devise ways of making the most of the available, while remaining sane and healthy.
Behind this new development, according to researchers is the rise of digital media, which has now evolved to become an important and almost indispensable aspect of human life (Kalpathi Subramanian, Myth and Mystery of Shrinking Attention Span, in IJTRD, Vol. 5(3), 2018).
While the effects of the attention span crisis are widespread across different aspects of human life, in this article we will be focus on the need to enable people, especially young ones to navigate the digital space with an awareness of its impending dark sides which can hinder their capabilities to make the most out of wholistic and integral education which should ideally lead to integral maturity, a sharper focus in life, and increased efficiency.
Albert Einstein (1946) in his letter to Otto Juliusburger, a psychiatrist, expressed his concern about the rise of technology and its manifold possibilities, saying: “I believe that the abominable deterioration of ethical standards stems primarily from the mechanization and depersonalization of our lives – a disastrous byproduct of science and technology. Nostra culpa! (We are to blame!)”
From my personal experience, about 8 years ago, I could read up to 50 pages of a novel (paper book) while sitting in the same place without feeling the urge to move around or do something else. My attention span was higher then.
However, it is different today. I prefer to read soft copies using the computer, which obviously will be interrupted every now and then. This might resonate with many others as well.
The digital space conditions us to work at its own speed, which is considerably faster as compared to the normal human thought and task processing speed. While we are able to process tasks more deeply with our mental strengths, we are not left undamaged when we switch our attention every 40 seconds (the said global average) to different, and oftentimes unrelated tasks.
The idea of multitasking, in this sense, comes with its limits as it is not necessarily applicable in the same way when it comes to the digital spaces and modern communication technology.
Just like in any progressing work, there is a switching cost as well as an assurance of impending underperformance of either one or all of the tasks.
The switching cost is the loss of time, mental resources, and smooth continuity in the accomplishment of the tasks, as one, upon returning to the task has to reconfigure himself/herself into the world of the task at hand.
With the inability to concentrate attentively on one task, it is difficult to make the most of our creativity and innovation capacity as our minds wander all around. (Greg McOwenn, ‘Essentialism: The Disciplined pursuit of Less,’ 2014; James Clear, ‘The Myth of Multitasking: Why Fewer Priorities Lead to Better Work’).
Think of a typical teenager or youth whose multitasking entails switching from one social media platform to another, from one device to another, while watching television, and at the same time talking to a friend present with them.
Does ability to do all that give an assurance of effectiveness? Is this loop even close to any genuine or heroic productivity? Yet this is where many young people are today; a reason many will not afford to lack access to internet for a single day.
Furthermore, the digital atmosphere trains the minds of its users to be busy and occupied.
With phones it is worse as at the moment as the users are likely to go deeper and deeper on the internet, leading to mindless scrolling, which can later became a habit and an unmeditated preoccupation.
In his recently published book, James Reyes refers to social media as the ‘mindless journey.’ The AI algorithm according to him tends to lead us even further to other mindless forms of entertainment. (James W Reyes, ‘Education is Freedom: The Future is in Your Hands’, 2024).
As such, when we speak about attention span reduction we are particularly emphasizing the present reduction of attention in work-related tasks, especially among the younger generations, the Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
There is obviously a rise in diversified attention of the feeding audio-visual media, which, looked at from a different lens will have many positive advantages as well.
Notwithstanding, we should look at the attention span decline as a challenge of our time. Experts propose that we encourage young people to read more, to play puzzles and other memory and focus games, to put our use and access of technology and internet in check, and more especially for children, as well as engage regularly in physical activities and creative story telling.
These activities will help to improve the mental strengths, and for the young ones, will increase their attention span by developing in them task discipline and the excitement to learn and achieve.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation. He writes from Manila, the Philippines. Social media: Shimbo Pastory. Website: www.shimbopastory.com.