How information is slowly killing our attention spans

So i have been reading the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (its great – read it), and its filled to the brim with interesting factoids about our societies impact on the human ability to focus.

It got me thinking about how technological advancements have wired our brains to consume content fast. If your like most of us, before you got to this point in the article you probably scrolled to the end to check how long this article is, then spent a second or two on the graphics to see if you could get a jist of the article before you bother reading something that would only take you 5-10mins. After all, your a busy person and there are other things you could be reading.

With the internet, we have access to all sorts of information at our fingertips – we can learn about any topic, stream any TV show and stay in touch with people anywhere across the globe. We all understand the internets impact on information flow – there is more of it and it impacts what we pay attention to right?

Right, but theres more.

Because we have an endless buffet of new data coming in every hour and only a fixed number of hours in a day, this phenomenon generates a fear of missing out. And this fear of missing out causes us to scroll endlessly to the next trending video or article so that we are in the know. We start prioritizing volume of information over depth so that we remain caught up.

Behave this way long enough and our attention span diminishes. FOMO litteraly trains our ability to remained focused for sustained amounts of time, out of us. We often blame social media for this – the constant connection to likes and followers taking our attention away from things like reading or being present in the moment.

But social media may not be the culprit. Social media is just one of the many faces of information overload and the easiest one to blame.

The need to keep up with the speed of information is pervasive in all aspects of our lives. Employees constantly context switching from task to task, from slack to excel then back to slack because cindy wants you to work on a powerpoint presentation for a big report out. Rushing back and forth between meetings to stay on top of everything, trying to find time to do deep concentrated work for more than 90 mins is a luxury in corporate america. You cant afford to slow down and focus on one thing when John is working on 10 things in the same time span. John may end up getting promoted over you! Volume of work and speed is attibuted to success and working hard. So, we end up sacrificing depth in all sorts of dimensions, because depth takes time and reflection.

Our behaviour is litterally speeding up to keep up with information.

  • People talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s.
  • We walk 10% faster in cities than we did 20 years age
  • We read differently, we skim more trying to get the jist of an article rather than going over it sentence by sentence. (Did you read this far into the article?)

So what to do? Practice activities that force you to slow down – yoga, meditation etc. A baseline that makes sense to me is to simply read more and complete books you find interesting. Ask yourself whether you finish the books you read. Reading a book is one of the deepest forms of focus we experience – it has to be done over time, its dedicated to a singular topic and requires concentration. This is one obvious activity that will help train your focus. Don’t feel bad if you don’t finish or even read books today. Just start. In the book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari asserts that some Harvard professors cant get their students to finish books anymore. So instead, they give them short podcasts or videos to watch. Harvard students, who presumably will one day shape our world, are also struggling with this. You are not alone.

But it does beg the question, at this rate, in order to aid our fragmented attention spans, will we develop technology (with AI?) to the point where we can get complex tasks done in 10mins or less? Will the ability for sustained focus become irrelevant in the future?

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