Short attention span society

Wait. What? A post on Daily Writing Tips called Web Usability Revisited says that I have to resort to trickery to get you to read past this first paragraph. The inference is that a large segment of our society is too busy, or too jaded, to read more than the first paragraph of anything written. And that in order for me to get you to move on to the second and subsequent paragraphs I should use crutches like bolding, sub-headings and bulleted lists. And that I should place the conclusion of my post here in this first paragraph.

I believe the problem is that we have been conditioned to have short attention spans and that since we are inundated and bombarded with so much information at such a tremendous rate, most of it remarkably inane, from the moment we climb out of bed until we fall asleep again, we don’t know where to spend our time. And our ability to learn new things is suffering.

Does this mean that since we don’t read past the first paragraph we are forming opinions on that post based on just those first few words and accepting it as fact? Does it mean that we are absent mindedly surfing the information super highway without any thought process at all, stopping only on flashy graphics?

If so, why am I continuing to write this post since the majority of web surfers have already moved on either with or without the possibility or learning some new insight into our society? Indeed, what is the point of ever writing anything longer than one sentence if it doesn’t describe some awesome photograph or scream out some supermarket-rag headline like Brittney and Paris are having my alien babies?

Information overload is affecting us in ways that we are not even conscious of yet. Our brains absorb what is thrown before us and because of the amount of information we are exposed to, we expect it to be as condensed as possible, and presented as efficiently as possible, in order to take in the maximum amount of data in the shortest amount of time.

Television delivers short programming segments interrupted by a series of shorter segments during commercial breaks, and I believe that this constant barrage of short segments from the time we are infants is conditioning us to have short attention spans. As a result, we expect every bit of data to be delivered in short bursts, and if it isn’t able to grab our attention quickly then the chance of receiving it is lost.

Thanks to StumbleUpon, those short bursts can be delivered even quicker than ever before. We can sit in front of our computer monitors for hours and have access to millions of websites just for the pure joy of accessing as many as we can. If our attention is so short then this type of browsing experience would serve no other useful purpose than to add quantity to our web experience. The sites that get the most thumbs up are the most graphically intense.

As a result of our short attention span, reading rates are falling along with reading comprehension. The National Endowment for the Arts recently published findings that show the literacy rate for the general public was less than 50%. Reading books for entertainment or as a source of information is becoming a thing of the past. And I cannot imagine that reading on the internet is taking up the slack. As a result of less reading our language and writing skills are abysmal.

Articulation is suffering and therefore the ability to communicate in an ever more complex and technologically advanced world is suffering. The English language is butchered on a daily basis and this new hybrid is being accepted as the norm. There simply is no desire to be articulate. This is why so many mediocre authors are able to get their books published. Without good writing to stimulate people into becoming educated, adaptive, logical thinkers our future is looking very dim.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

- Ray Bradbury

Certainly, we have some great authors writing some fantastic prose today, but the big money is in motion pictures. Why? Because the majority of people would rather watch the movie than read the book. How much crap do you suppose is accepted as entertainment because it is flashy and graphic?

Our libraries are becoming little more than museums to books that get read by an ever decreasing number of our society. Who checks out books from libraries? Students for class assignments, mostly. And a handful of people who still want to experience the richness of the written word, but the body of that satisfying richness is dwindling. A best-selling author can only hope to sell a mere 135,000 copies to a public of 300 million!

We buy magazines loaded with pretty pictures and after viewing them the magazine is tossed onto a pile and collects dust without the articles being read.

The relationship between the internet and the media is a perfect match for our attention-depleted public because we only have to read one line in the highlights section to get ‘up to speed’ on current events. Try talking to someone about any news topic, they will probably say “yeah, I heard about that but I didn’t get the details”. You know why they only ‘heard’ about it but didn’t get any ‘details’? Because they skimmed the headlines without clicking to the story. This has become the new ‘USA Today’ approach to getting the news. Remember when USA Today first began publishing? Their novel approach to getting the news out was to put as many headlines and pictures on the front page as they could because most people did not want the details. They could just skim over the front page on the way to their jobs.

While we allow ourselves to be dumbed-down by not taking the time to read the rest of the world is surpassing us in education, technology and industry. American eighth graders rank ninth worldwide in science scores--and 15th in math, behind students in Estonia, Hungary, and Malaysia. And for years, U.S. students have been migrating away from hard sciences--which tends to be the source of cutting-edge new products and other innovations.

We are just not hungry enough anymore. We have grown complacent with being number one for so long that we have taken this fatal attitude that we can sit back and watch the number two’s grovel to keep up. I’ve got news for all of you. Number two is getting smarter and hungrier by educating themselves, by reading. And they are not doing it by watching television or surfing the internet for cool pictures.

We need to get our children motivated enough to get our education level back up in order to compete with the world again. We need to reopen our minds and get those creative and innovated juices flowing again. We need to get our stagnated free-thinking logic working on technology that will allow us to survive the major problems facing us today and in the future.

The best way to do all of this is to read everything we can get our hands on. Effective communication with the rest of the world depends entirely on literacy. We cannot afford the luxury of watching life go by without finding and celebrating the intelligence that we could find if we would only take the time to read it.