Why Short Attention Spans on the Internet Are a Good Thing
A lot of people nowadays love to blame the internet for what they perceive as an ever-growing epidemic of short attention spans. Apparently this causes a horrible lack of focus that will ruin your life or something similar.
Granted, people tend to jump around a lot, going from site to site and perhaps only spending a few seconds at each. But is this really because of a lack of concentration ability?
Definitely not.
Because the internet is an open platform, there is a ridiculous amount of content out there, all competing for your time. This is simply means that readers must be much more picky about what they choose to consume–there simply is not enough time to read it all.
There are, of course, a lot of innovations out there attempting to allow people to consume more in smaller amounts of time (such as feed readers), but even with these many of the feeds will not be read.
This is not a problem.
It’s not a negative trait the internet brought upon us. It has not shortened our concentration ability per se, but simply raised our quality standards.
As readers we have more to choose from, and as publishers we need to be more considerate of our readers’ time. These are good things.
This is the post I maybe should have written today — I wrote another one, panicky and ill-at-ease over the information overload we do all face at times.
I’m not sure that the vast amount of information (data?) we’re faced with on the internet today has raised our standards per se. Has it? But maybe we’ve been thrown back to a more meticulous approach to what we’re being served, a more thought-out way of dealing with the possibilities.
In the end, you are right: this is not a problem, and it’s not a bad thing to sit back, relax and realize we cannot possibly take it all in — and not go nuts over it.
Well, I think skimming and social media sites like Digg, Reddit, etc., are all ways of getting through the loads of information and finding what’s the best use of one’s time. I’d say that raises standards to a point–if the headlines don’t look interesting enough, it gets tossed in a pile. If it doesn’t get enough votes, you don’t read it.