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Why Are Our Attention Spans Shortening?
Students discuss the reasons people are so easily distracted.
Editor’s note: In this Future View, students discuss decreasing attention spans. Next week we’ll ask, “Some colleges use race as a factor when admitting applicants. Should colleges be able to continue to admit students based on race? Or should we be opposing affirmative action on college campuses?”
Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words before Nov. 8. The best responses will be published that night. Click here to submit a video to our Future View Snapchat show.
New World Chains
We live in a civilization attached to instant pleasure. Anyone who has used TikTok knows this. Everything in our world, from a rise in sedentary jobs to videogames, sexual promiscuity, pornography and nonstop music, feeds on an appetite for instant pleasure and low attention spans.
Modern liberalism’s advancement of efficiency and corporate interests, under the intellectual guise of human flourishing, have contributed to this problem. Replacing God, community and family with individualism has left people looking within themselves to find meaning that is not there.
How will we pursue what is honorable, chivalrous and beautiful if we cannot maintain an attention span longer than eight seconds? Romantic virtues aside, millennials and Gen Z are experiencing astronomical levels of anxiety and depression. Could a lack of self-agency and control contribute to these heightened feelings of anxiety and vanity? An inability to put aside pleasure is apparent in our declining marriage rate: If individuals struggle to devote seconds of attention to a task, how will they devote the rest of their lives to a partner?
We are responsible for addressing this attention span crisis, lest the corporations drugging our society continue confining us to Brave New World-style slavery.
—Chanidu Gamage, The University of British Columbia, political science
We Don’t Have Low Standards
When I turn on the TV, I am shocked by the bland content. Aside from live sports and news, networks seem to air a rotating cycle of NCIS, Judge Judy and Wheel of Fortune spinoffs—with Medicare Advantage plans hawked during breaks. These are the vestiges of an era during which three major networks competed to be as appealing as possible to the broadest swath of the population.
But with the rise of new forms of media, it has become important to create specialized content for different subsets of its consumers. Viewers have options now, and they exercise them in a competitive environment that constantly forces content creators to innovate and create unique products for their customers.
The human attention span has decreased because we now have more and better choices for entertainment, so we are less willing to spend time consuming a poor product. When headlines claim that humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, consider if that’s really a bad thing. A goldfish sits in a glass bowl, doing nothing until it dies. It will have lower standards for what can keep its attention.
—Lucas Martin, Harvard University, applied mathematics
Spare the Kids
Long attention spans are essential for children. Before their first day of school, children with access to YouTube and other forms of social media have had their brains rewired. Math, science and composition will always be less interesting than online content specifically tailored to these children’s preferences. Social media keeps tweens and teens from experiencing the world in a more meaningful way, and it exposes them to shallow connections in an age with increasing anxiety and depression. Long attention spans brought humanity the work of Einstein and Newton; let’s stop allowing technology to change us and embrace deep thinking.
—Patrick Barry, Georgia Institute of Technology, aerospace engineering
The Intellectual Advantage
We are blissfully unaware of how blessed we are to have the most expansive variety of resources in the history of humankind constantly at our fingertips. Living in the Information Age, we must conform to the reality that enterprising minds prioritize access to high-quality information and, with lower attention spans, can digest this information at increasingly rapid rates. Being able to understand complex ideas in spite of reduced attention spans is producing people with efficient models of comprehension and a skill set built for impromptu problem solving. Ultimately, it is up to individuals whether they want to strengthen this instant information-processing muscle or whether they want to devalue this intellectual advantage for the sake of short-term gratification via the consumption of trendy but pointless content.
—Rayn Khan, University of Minnesota, marketing
Read a Book
TikTok is the most detrimental thing to happen to our attention spans. It’s an endless cycle of bright colors and catchy sounds meant to be consumed faster than our brains can process the content. Why are we always on our phones? Because tech moguls and social-media developers designed a piece of technology so addicting and damaging that we can’t handle concentrating on real life.
We shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for being easily distracted; developers created this technology to be addictive. But we can resist by making real efforts to slow down our consumption. Reading a book is an easy and simple solution because it forces us to concentrate on the words on the page. There’s nowhere to scroll.
—Maddie Heinz, Macalester College, English and political science
Click here to submit a response to next week’s Future View.