Our attention span is getting shorter according to extensive research on that subject. Based on those findings, I wonder how folks doing the studies were able to concentrate long enough to finish them.
An article in Time magazine a while back stated that people could focus intently on something for just eight seconds. The report went on to say that goldfish can concentrate for nine seconds.
Don’t ask me how they were able to determine how long a goldfish can concentrate. I lost interest in the article before I got to that explanation and turned to another page.
Some other research shows that the millions of people who use the Internet spend an average of less than one minute on a site before jumping to something else.
The days when people would sit at the kitchen table and read the morning newspaper word for word while sipping their coffee are over. Daily papers are dwindling as our attention span shrinks.
When I was growing up, we got both morning and afternoon papers. My parents tried to memorize them, and I read everything in the sports section including the box scores in the tiny print.
My folks kept the papers around long enough to do the crossword puzzles, and my dad made funny hats for us with the Sunday morning comics.
Some experts say the decline in attention spans started with television. We became conditioned to paying attention to programs for a few minutes and then giving our brain a break for commercials.
Then I-phones, social media and all that stuff came along and made it worse. Younger folks started communicating on Twitter with limits of 20 or 30 words at a time.
Even that much writing and reading was too much for many of them, so they started using those strange emojis with smiling or frowning faces, heart symbols, thumbs up and other signs.
To put that form of communication into perspective, there are about 350 words on one page of a book. That’s a lot of reading for people who communicate with brief notes and emojis.
When I worked at the newspaper in New Orleans, editors might ask for a 1,500-word feature story or a 1,000-word column.
I did extended columns like that for years for newspapers, a statewide magazine and other publications. My limit now is 750 words, and that is becoming too long for shorter attention spans.
Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist from Alabama and one of the South’s best writers, has cut his essays to the bone. He wrote lengthy columns while winning the Pulitzer, but his pieces in Southern Living now are just 600 words or so.
Everybody’s getting the message. People can’t read, listen or concentrate as long as they used to. The goldfish comparison is a reference to intense, absolute concentration. But our limit just to pay a little attention is 20 minutes at best according to experts.
Speech-writing specialists say most verbal presentations should be no longer than 15 to 20 minutes, and those numbers keep being lowered too.
An extensive study for the U.S. Navy showed that an audience’s ability to focus on a speaker’s message and remember what was said declines sharply at 18 minutes. Listeners’ eyes glaze over after that.
These attention span issues have all changed since I was young. I loved baseball growing up and could sit on the front porch and listen to St. Louis Cardinals games for hours at a time.
Or bat rocks into an open field at the end of our street while broadcasting imaginary games under my breath. Not another thought entered my mind during those long, make-believe battles.
Most of the boys in the neighborhood had little pinball machine baseball games. We could be both teams in those games, firing the pinballs and watching them land on strikeouts, home runs, singles, walks or flyouts to left field. That required our total concentration.
I could stand on the banks of the mill ponds and bream fish with my dad all day with no distractions. My mind never wandered like our thoughts do now as attention spans diminish.
So people who write things like this or make talks or reach folks in similar ways need to keep cutting back on the time they demand of their readers and listeners.
These columns have been trimmed a few times and will likely be cut some more. I might write longer things once in a while for goldfish.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES