Becoming 21st century goldfish

The decline of attention spans.

Our constant need for information, communication, and visual stimulation had to begin somewhere. We weren’t always so obsessed with communication speed and flow as we are now – were we?

I’d say no. I’m sure that my Grandparents had no trouble with not having a smartphone and ipad to keep them busy. In fact, I remember sitting for hours with my Grandma when I was little and she would watch The Lawrence Welk Show[1] every single Saturday night. My husband and I recently watched an episode of Lawrence Welk just so he could see what I “suffered” through on those Saturday nights being babysat by Grandma.

If you aren’t familiar with the Lawrence Welk Show let me tell you… it’s an old TV song and dance variety show hosted by a man named Lawrence Welk and it aired on PBS. It’s an hour long and is filled with people performing by tap dancing, waltzing, singing, and doing short skits dressed in the ultimate 60’s garb with teased hair to the nines!  Terribly boring, I know. But it’s fascinating to watch it now and compare it with our standards for the 21^st century television programming.

When we watched the show recently we were amazed at how long the scene shots were. There were long periods of the same shot (a minute or longer). No angle changes, no camera changes – just the same shot. The average shot length (ASL) now is typically around 4-5 seconds in length[2]. The screen is constantly changing scenes, shots, people, music etc. We bounce from one media stimulation to the next.

As Kelton Cobb states in his book Theology and Popular Culture, “it [TV] flattens out the momentous and the trivial. In one weekend of television viewing, one can see more drama, human tragedy, comedy, feats of spectacular achievement, and sexual escapades than most of our ancestors would have seen in a year or even their lifetimes. And these highs and lows flow out of the set in a steady stream, interrupted only by ad pitches to buy the sponsor’s products” (p. 38). 


While some argue that TV is one of the main culprits for shortening our attention spans; others argue that it is the Internet.

In 2002, BBC published an article about the impact of the digital age on our attention spans[3]. Researchers found that even if a website is engaging “most online viewers spend less than 60 seconds at an average site”. There is so much information and media available that users don’t know when to stop searching. We have a tendency to just keep bouncing from website to website and from link to link gathering more information.  The article also argues that the web has helped decrease our attention span so much that it can now dip down to only 9 seconds.

9 seconds until we move onto the next thing, the next link, the next page, the next blog, the next news story…. There is always a next in the information age. It is important to point out that goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds. Yes, Goldfish. Have we become as attention deficit as goldfish?

So maybe it isn’t all bad though. Maybe we are becoming super-humans with the ability to research (or “google”) anything. We have the world at our finger tips. Are we less just for having the shorter attention spans that go with it? Perhaps we’ll delve into the more positive side of multi tasking in the next post….

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[1] http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=lawrencewelk

[2] http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/statistical_analysis.html

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1834682.stm