Digital Media: Nothing Beats ‘Short and Sweet’

            Go on, go on and do homework without checking your phone or Facebook. Give it a try. Just a few measly hours. Should be easy, right? Would it really be so easy if you knew that the average smart phone user checks their phone about 34 times a day? 10 minutes apart each time? We check our phones on an average of 6 times an hour; reducing it to 0 seems so out of reach. 

            Just within ten years time, the average human’s attention span has decreased by a dramatic seven minutes. From 1998 to 2008 the average attention span has shrunk over a whopping 50%. Is it therefore a coincidence that during the same time span, technology and digital media has been developing faster than ever and booming like crazy? This strong correlation (as one goes up, the other goes down) represents a very clear cause and effect. In fact, the average attention span of humans in 2012 is 8 seconds, that’s 1 second less than a goldfish! 

            The Internet has had a huge impact on modern society where everything is at the touch of your fingertips. Where 17% of page views when browsing on the Internet last less than 4 seconds! http://www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics.

            There is a very big distinction between catching the audience’s attention and keeping that attention. It seems that shorter the time a video is shown, the higher chances of the audience keeping their attention. In these statistics (http://blog.treepodia.com/2010/03/at-60-seconds-more-than-half-your-audience-is-gone/) we can see that a 10 second video will hold the full attention 89.61% of the time while a 60 second video will only hold 46.44% and a 5 minute video, a sad 9.42%. 

 

            The evolving digital brain is not complete without a development of a short attention span. Our digitally wired brains are always hungry for new entertainment, jumping around from one site to the next, one app to the next and one channel to the next. But who says we only have to choose one form of media at a time? Having many options and choices sound like such good thing but when it comes to digital media, decision overload does exist. The average smartphone user has an average of 65 apps on their phone and these 65 apps were chosen from 60,000 app options. You better choose those 65 apps wisely. 17% of people say they lose their attention span because of all the cluttered choices around them.

            We can see that as technology begins to surge, our attention span begins to plummet.

            What better way to study the effects of digital media on student’s attention span at the University of Maryland, College park than entering the good old library (a supposedly safe haven for getting non-stop consecutive hours of productive work done, right?) We could set up a system where whenever a computer screen (a university owned desktop, not a personal laptop) turns to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube a count will be recorded. We could test this during the week leading up to midterms where the library is sure to be populated.