Although the attention span myth is one of those things that is taken to be almost idiomatic, there’s actually very little empirical evidence for it.
There’s no such thing as an ‘average’ attention span, and even for those individual tasks it would be very much context dependent (where I’m sitting, what I’m doing at the time, my general opinion of the author, the mood I’m in).
It’s a nice story, and it will invariably generate a nice stream of anecdata in a comments section like this, but there’s very little evidence for it at all.
There's no such thing as an average. Dividing sums isn't real.
We can't even measure what attracts the attention of people. We can't track their eyes. We haven't been improving our techniques for catching someones attention and focus for the last decades+. We don't try to keep people hooked to our websites by making sure they stay engaged. FarmVille is a only a myth, too. "Endless scrolling" doesn't actually exist either.
Chatbots on websites, which try to engage you in a conversation within seconds of inactivity, don't actually do so to keep your attention on the site.
Man ...
If all your understanding is based solely on data other people have gathered, then you not only are completely unaware of all the potential data that hasn't been gathered yet, you also have only very little understanding of pretty much anything out there.
This is an extremely crucial point. Though I do think social media apps are designed to be addictive in a negative way, the narrative that they are destroying our attention spans has absolutely no backing in science and yet it is taken almost as common sense.
Totally agree with both of you. I don't see this issue in terms of "attention span" per se, rather we now have an ever-present device that most often contains software engineered to grab as much of our attention as it possibly can. I can't think of anything similar past generations had that was close to this in terms of magnitude and accessibility. We all know the rat in a box will tap the dopamine button as many times as it can and now, unprecedentedly, we carry that button in our pocket every day.
There's simply no empirical evidence that you love your wife/mother, so it would be foolish to believe that you do. Until a study is funded there's just no way for you to know. Trust science
There’s no such thing as an ‘average’ attention span, and even for those individual tasks it would be very much context dependent (where I’m sitting, what I’m doing at the time, my general opinion of the author, the mood I’m in).
It’s a nice story, and it will invariably generate a nice stream of anecdata in a comments section like this, but there’s very little evidence for it at all.