Social media is becoming ever more present in our daily lives, for better or for worse. Are our attention spans decreasing as a result?
Social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are using enormous computing power to serve us the most exciting and attention grabbing content. Netflix is constantly testing interface changes to keep you watching. In recent years, a lot of buzz has emerged about changing attention spans and how they have become precursors for a society in decline. This begs the question whether our attention spans are decreasing and how harmful this is to our daily lives. Many researchers around the world are trying to answer this question.
Time spent on social media on the rise
Social media usage has been steadily on the rise across the globe. In 2012, the average internet user spent an average of 90 minutes on social media per day. This number had increased to 128 minutes just four years later. Between 2019 and 2021 the daily time spent on social media remained a steady 145 minutes, eventually peaking in 2023 at 151 minutes and dropping to 143 minutes by 2024. Time spent on social media fluctuates heavily per demographic, with U.S. teenagers spending multiple hours a day on social media, a survey conducted by analytics and advisory company Gallop showed.
The findings published in October 2013, found that teenagers aged between 13 and 19 years old spend an average of 4.8 hours per day on social media. Among the 1,500 surveyed adolescents 51 percent spent at least four per day on social media. The survey measured screen time across multiple platforms, including YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. Seventeen year olds stood out in particular with 62 percent spending at least four hours on social media, reaching an average 5.8 hours, more than any other cohort within the survey.
Split per gender, 55 percent of girls spent at least four on social media compared to 48 percent of boys. Girls averaged 5.3 hours per day, compared to boys, who spent 4.4 on average on social media. Visual based social media saw the most engagement, with YouTube receiving the most engagement from adolescents, who spend 1.9 hours on average on the platform. This was followed by Tiktok, where teenagers spent 1.5 hours. Girls favored TikTok over other platforms, with boys spending the most time on YouTube.
The high usage sparks fears amongst its users. A King’s College London survey published in the U.K. in February 2022, showed that adults feared their attention spans were negatively impacted by technology usage. The survey found that U.K. adults severely underestimated their phone usage. Respondents indicated they only checked their phones 25 times per day, while the average set at 80 times a day. While considering their phone usage problematic, 50 percent indicated having trouble to reduce checking their mobile devices. This phenomenon was especially prevalent amongst young and middle-aged demographics.
As a result, 49 percent of respondents believed their attention spans have been negatively impacted by technology usage. Some of the beliefs are firmly rooted in misconceptions about human attention span, a topic later discussed in this article. Half (50 percent) of the respondents indicated they were convinced that the average human attention span was a mere eight seconds, with 51 percent saying that the decrease in attention span is primarily affecting younger generations, despite 47 percent believing that a person’s personality can influence their attention spans.
The survey found that 66 percent believed younger people suffered more from decreasing attention spans, with 58 percent of 18 to 34 year olds believing this development. Whatever the belief system or preconceived notions about the technology usage persist, multiple demographics believe technology is detrimental, may it be in part fueled by the complexity of modern life.
Understanding attention spans
Before diving into recent findings of our attention spans, we have to understand what attention is and how our minds try to focus. In March 2019, researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research are trying to get a better understanding of how conditions such as ADHD impact the brain. In a world with constant external stimuli, researchers question which regions of the brian control attention and how it processes incoming information. Researchers at the institute found that during moments of focus, neurons in the visual cortex fire synchronously, suppressing irrelevant stimuli.
These neurons oscillate at a particular frequency, as our attention diverges, these frequencies change, causing us to lose focus. Yasaman Bagherzadeh, postdoc in the Desimone lab, part of the Neuroscience Research Lab at MIT, explains that neurons in the alpha range of 8 to 12 Hz are linked to inattention and distracting information. Meanwhile, neurons that are within the gamma range of a frequency ranging between 30 Hz to 150 Hz are associated with attention and focus on a target. In practice this means that the brain is actively suppressing irrelevant stimuli to maintain focus. The brain can filter out irrelevant objects, or divert attention when necessary.
Attention spans of 40 seconds
In November 2022, science platform Singularity spoke with the Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Gloria Mark about changing attention spans in the digital age. Mark is the author of Attention Span about techniques to restore attention spans and bring back production and happiness. Mark has been active in the world of academia for multiple decades, where she noticed a dramatic shift as to how students and researchers spend their available time. As the world entered the 2000s and digital technologies were starting to take-off, a drastic shift occurred across her professional life.
No longer did her academic life revolve around deep focussed research work. Her workload started to expand with her lunchtime being eaten up by all the responsibilities she had as a tudor. Her colleagues started to eat their lunches sitting in front of a computer, until she eventually adopted the same habit, seeing more of her time disappear into her digital tasks. This served as the precursor for her to dive into attention span and how it operated in a world entranced by digital technologies.
Instead of tracking people’s behaviors in a laboratory setting, she and her team looked at screen time in real environments. This gave them a unique opportunity to measure attention spans in day-to-day settings, providing the first empirical data to track attention spans. Tracking started in 2004, with results showing that people spent 2.5 minutes on any screen before switching to another activity. In a workplace setting, the screen time was every 3 minutes. Mark and her team measured these behaviors by shadowing participants, with a stopwatch in hand to track each behavioral change.
As time progressed, Mark and her team noticed, the attention span started to measurably decrease. In recent years other researchers picked up attention span tracking, finding that attention spans between activity switching had dramatically fallen, dropping to a mere 47 seconds on average, with a median of 40 seconds. This raised a variety of questions with academics. Is a decreasing attention problematic and does interacting with our devices play a part in this shift?
Mark compares the human mind to white board filled with different tasks. As people switch tasks they erase the contents and add new ones. As switching between tasks increases in frequency, the amount of content that is being erased, written and rewritten grows exponentially. Switching between tasks is not a new development, but the emergence of novel technologies has increased the writing and erasing processes in our minds exponentially. As people start to switch more frequently between tasks, Mark notes, stress levels increase and performance suffers.
Maintaining focus requires higher resources from the body. These resources have not grown, while the external stimuli have, hence the mind is depleting much quicker. The constant bombardment of information and external stimuli is interfering with the task at hand. This translates to a jerky attention span when away from our computers and smartphones, with other sources of media such as television further decreasing our attention spans. It is to be expected that as we spend more of our time with our digital devices, the conditioning of our brain is going to change, Mark commented.
Television shots have become noticeably shorter over time. On average a TV and film shot has decreased to four seconds, with music videos having an even shorter shot duration. Commercials have been following the same pattern, with the average duration of commercials being much longer in the past. Today, commercials can be as short as six seconds. This practice isn’t uncommon to digital advertisers. Those who have extensively used video advertisements, have seen that digital platforms favor shorter ads. In radio, the tag-on is another example of shortened ad formats.
The reason as to why these ads have become shorter is difficult to answer. Mark theorizes it might be the directors and editors themselves who cater to their own decreasing attention spans, creating content that captivates them. Simultaneously, YouTubers have been known for their jump cuts, aggressively cutting video content, making the video erratic. Creators aim to add as much content as possible. We ourselves can hypothesize that the need to push for content, results in impatient editing, lowering the bar of what is deemed as acceptable.
From a marketers perspective, we can view the shortening of ad slots as a business decision. Adding shorter advertising slots allows for more advertisers to purchase a spot, decreasing the overall costs for ad space. Simultaneously, platforms ensure a steady stream of new, smaller advertisers who are willing to purchase ad slots at lower rates. While this remains solely speculative, shorter ad formats don’t have to directly correlate to changing media consumption, but can be strongly fueled by the desire for increased revenue generation.
Our modern lives
In January 2022, Johann Hari argued that our attention spans didn’t collapse, but that it was stolen by social media platforms and aspects of modern life that are constantly competing for our attention. Hari retells the story of his godson, who once passionate about Elvis Presley, seemingly overnight, at the age of 15, fell into the endless void of digital content. Spending every possible hour of the day on YouTube, WhatsApp and adult entertainment. His mind was racing between social media platforms, capturing little of what was passing by. Over the decade that Hari’s grandson turned into an adult, the world drove into a world of dissociation and obsession.
As Hari turned 40, he reminisced about the days where he read many books a year. As our daily lives became more connected, he read less and less books. To escape the void of mind numbing digital content, he took his godson to Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. But even in real world events, one cannot escape digital devices. Upon their arrival they received an iPad, equipped with earbuds, guiding you through the estate. Eagerly snapping pictures of each room as the narrator explains the scenery. Hari was not alone. All visitors walked around with blank faces, he described. Instead of taking in the scenery, they were glued to their screens. Absentmindedly scanning history.
Hari’s experiences are not unique, nor that of his grandson. Digital devices are entering our lives earlier and earlier, unlocking infinite forms of entertainment, eroding our experiences of the real world. Professor for Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Joel Nigg, explained to Hari that people were developing a so-called attentional pathogenic culture, meaning a society where sustained and deep focus become ever more scarce. One of the reasons, Nigg theorized, was our changing environment. French professor Barbara Demeneix, said that our brains are incapable of functioning as intended in our modern society.
Underdeveloped attention spans
In February 2023, the American Psychologist Association spoke with Mark about her findings and discussed the impact of the internet and devices on children’s attention spans. Research has primarily focussed on adults, but children are spending more time than ever on their digital devices. Mark noted that society should be concerned with this development, as children between the ages two to four years old, are averaging two and half hours of screen time per day. Children aged between five to eight average three hours of screen time per day.
Screen time is not only divided by television and YouTube, but also with gaming. Mark points out that lab studies have shown that younger children are more easily distracted than older ones. Additionally, they have more trouble regaining focus. This could translate to children associating distraction as normal behavior. Hence, regions in the brain will not properly develop. Behaviors such as self-control, part of the executive function skills to complete multiple tasks successfully, aren’t able to fully form. These problems are amplified as schools offer larger parts of their curriculum digitally.
While the findings are alarming, back in March 2019, Jason M. Lodge for School of Education at The University of Queensland, St. Lucia in Australia together with William J. Harrison from the Queensland Brain Institute, part of The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia brought a more nuanced view. The researchers acknowledge that there’s a lot of debate about whether digital technologies emerging in learning environments have a detrimental impact of student’s cognitive abilities and their cognitive functioning. However, both aim to deliver nuance for this complex subject.
The researchers note that technology has unlocked novel ways of accessing, processing and correcting learning. Mobile devices meanwhile have granted unparalleled access to near infinite amounts of information. This has caused a disruption in formal and informal education. Academics argued that the ease of access to information has a debilitating effect on learning capabilities, as attention spans are negatively impacted by technologies. Despite these seemingly novel warnings, the discussion related to attention spans has been around for centuries, both pointed out.
With the emergence of the printing press, discussions about the distribution of books leading to decreases in attention spans started to spread. Meanwhile, digital technologies restart the debate once again, citing multiple publications that warn about its harmful ways. Authors warn about the debilitating effects of novel technologies on memory and the ability to navigate social interactions. However, while popular media has jumped on to ring the alarm of impending societal collapse, hard evidence for impaired cognitive function is yet to be discovered.
The researchers cite findings from the Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute, Bron in France that tried to verify earlier publications about cognitive function in relation to internet usage. They found that while there was evidence that suggested changes in brain functioning, the results were sparse, providing little concrete evidence. Other researchers however found a strong correlation between the usage of digital resources and lower academic results in a formal education setting. Reading in particular seems to be impacted when consumed through digital sources.
Social media and attention disorders
The rise of digital materials raises the question whether these same technologies lead to a host of problems later in life or if they have already caused damage. Several research papers examine the relationship between excessive social media usage and attention deficit disorders. In July 2020, Maartje Boer from Utrecht University, Netherlands, examined the link between social media usage among adolescents with symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Boer cites multiple studies that seem to indicate that there’s a relation between the intensity of social media usage among adolescents who reported ADHD related symptoms.
Studies showed that adolescents who used social media intensively, were also accustomed to task switching in other portions of their lives. This leads to an expected inability to filter relevant and irrelevant information. A development also mentioned by Mark in her research studies. However despite multiple studies spanning multiple years alongside the rapid rise of social media usage, the researchers found evidence of correlation between the two, but evidence was scarce to conclude whether ADHD caused social media addiction.
In December 2022, Tycho Dekkers from the University Medical Center Groningen at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry for the University of Groningen reviewed studies that examined the relationship of adolescents with ADHD and social media usage. Dekkers notes that previous works have linked ADHD to more and problematic usage of social media. The appeal for extensive social media is a result of an imbalance between different brain regions, primarily in social interactions. Negative experiences amplify this imbalance and increase social media usage.
The fight for attention
Wherever you land on the spectrum of the debate revolving around attention spans in a digital age, tech companies are eagerly trying to keep you engaged with their platforms and will keep inventing new ways to ensure your attention isn’t spent elsewhere. TikTok uses its aggressive algorithm to lure in new and existing users as fast as possible and keep them on the platform for as long as humanly possible. At the slightest hint of lower engagement, it serves just the right content to prevent the user from leaving. We can stretch this development into the advertisement space.
While conclusive evidence or policies to restore or maintain attention spans is absent for the short term, we can hypothesize scenarios where time spent on digital platforms is decreasing. This possible outcome brings an interesting dynamic for advertisers and platform owners who, as digital users become more aware about their behavior, will have to fight for less engagement. As the hours spent are decreasing, so does the available ad placements. For platform owners this means the options to serve ads is bound to decrease. At first glance this will prove problematic, but they can counter this by increasing the cost per ad service.
On the end of the spectrum are the advertisers who will see their cost per conversion increase and their options to reach mass audiences and multiple occasions, plummet. In of itself these developments don’t have to mean the end of advertising as we know it. In fact, we might argue that the advertising space will return to an era where advertising was reserved for corporations with high budgets. Smaller businesses won’t be able to compete. In some sense we have already seen this across Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram where organic reach for businesses has become a relic of the past.
