How attention span works

Published: 30 July, 2008
Author: Josh Catone

The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds – the same as a goldfish,” said the BBC in 2002. “Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things,” Ted Selker, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the British news agency. “If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating.” Boy was he right.

No time has it been more evident that our attention spans have been severely diminished than on today’s web. Twitter, for example, asks us to reduce our thoughts to just 140 characters, while 12seconds.tv asks us to do that same in just 12 seconds. And the average length of the 12 billion videos US internet users consumed via the web in May? Just 2.7 minutes. Clearly, our attention on the web is fleeting.

In May, web usability consultant Jakob Neilsen found that the more words you add to a page the more people skim it. In other words, our short attention spans can’t handle long articles and we end up just skipping to the bottom. In my time as a blogger, I’ve generally found that shorter articles or articles that are broken up with sub headlines and bullet points or images tend to get more comments those that are mainly lengthy blocks of text (like this one, for example).

In the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, author Nick Carr asks if the internet is making us stupid. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” Carr writes. “My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.”

Carr blames his heavy use of the internet over the past few years for rewiring his brain to make it harder to absorb information that doesn’t come in bite-sized chunks. He probably has a point.