Hmmm, do you remember what happened eight seconds ago?
I heard recently that goldfish have an attention span of nine seconds. Let’s set aside for the moment how you go about measuring a goldfish’s mental faculties. Or why you bother to do so even if you could. And how much R&D grant money went down the drain in the study that arrived at this earth-shattering conclusion.
The relevance of this tidbit of trivia is that a study found that the average consumer has an attention span even shorter than the goldfish – eight seconds, according to the study. Researchers have been monitoring this trait for some time. The figure has dropped precipitously from twelve seconds in the year 2000.
This trend supports my oft made observation that we are living in an attention-deficit society. On the one hand, we have increased our ability to multitask which is a survival skill in the modern workplace. But in the process we have sacrificed our ability to focus. We are like fireflies flitting through each day – our attention indicator light constantly flickering.
It is my contention that this alarming trend is a side effect of the digital era in which we live. We are armed with an ever increasing array of digital devices and subject to a constant bombardment of digital stimuli from them.
E-mail messages have become ubiquitous in our lives. Experts in the field estimated that in 2015 there were 205 billion e-mails sent every day. This translates to 7.4 trillion e-mails every year and 2.4 million every second. Yes, every second. Our brains have been reprogrammed to expect new stimuli every eight seconds.
I cannot help but wonder if this fact underlies some of the disconcerting behaviours I witness. At least once a day, I see someone blasting through a red traffic light. I curse these individuals thinking that they just do not give a damn about my safety. But what if it is more about a constant of distraction such that they do not even notice that the light is red?
This past summer I was driving on a two lane country road on a Saturday. I saw a vehicle coming toward me in the wrong lane at a high rate of speed. I slowed down assuming that he/she would swing back into the proper lane. It did not happen. I had to pull over onto the gravel shoulder of the road to let the vehicle zoom past.
I watched in my rear view mirror. The vehicle went another hundred yards before moving back into the correct lane. Was the driver in such a distracted state that he/she lost all sense of where they were and what they were doing? A frightening thought, indeed.
I am labelling it the firefly metaphor – the constant state of overstimulation we experience that fragments our attention into staccato bursts. Call it the goldfish metaphor if that works better for you. Either way, for better or for worse, it is an alarming sign of the times.
~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.
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Tags: attentin span · digital world · firelies · goldfish · metaphor · Michael Robert DyetNo Comments