The World is Wrong about Your Attention Span

YOU may have heard, your attention span is abysmally short these days. It would appear that it is remarkable that you have reached the second sentence of this column. You were not always this way, they say, yet this is one of your defining qualities today. In fact, nobody is sure what exactly is modern about you except your attention span. The world is in a tizzy about your new incapacity to focus. Entire industries are wondering how to deliver their products to you in that fleeting time when you are attentive. And they are going terribly wrong, because your attention span is not the problem.

A few days ago, I saw a headline in the UK’s Times that paraphrased the Scottish writer Ian Rankin, one of the most popular writers on earth, as saying, “We authors should write for modern attention spans.” In January this year, an article in The Guardian asked whether Netflix was “deliberately dumbing down TV so people can watch while scrolling.” It lamented that plot-lines are too simple and stuff is repeated in case you get distracted. Educators are breaking lectures into shorter segments as though students of the past had ascetic focus. They even have a name for it: ‘brain breaks.’ The average TED talk, too, is shorter today, and a report says Spotify music samples are shorter than before. All this is because of your rumoured attention span.

Yet, I do not believe it is true that attention spans have changed significantly over the decades. People’s minds have always wandered. They have always struggled to focus. And most of them couldn’t bear to spend too much time with their own minds.
The real world, outside the phone, is so glorified today. But consider this thing that happens in the real world. You’re at a party and someone comes up and says that inane but useful thing, “What’s up?” And even as you answer, he looks behind you for something more interesting, which is never there. This has happened for decades, and not just in conversations. In everything people did, they looked beyond to see if there was something more interesting, which they never found.

“Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.” This was published in 1979, as a part of a novel by Italo Calvino. Not only is the short attention span old news, so is the lament about it.

What is really going on is this: There are people, who are in the business of getting your attention, and they are failing. They are attributing this failure to your inability to focus. That is what they did in 1979, and that is what they do now. And because they can’t berate you beyond a point, since you are the consumer after all, they blame the times. And something new that the times have wrought.

I don’t say there is no substance to the lament about modern attention spans. The fact that human attention was always fragile does not diminish the fact that the modern world has created extraordinary tools to facilitate distraction. A distraction is a kind of boredom that looks like entertainment, which saves you momentarily from another kind of boredom. Today, a slab of metal and glass at nearly everyone’s disposal captures the wandering mind and carries it far away, to some limbo. You could be working and reach for your phone, or an icon on your laptop, and suddenly ten minutes of your life are gone just like that.

In contrast, people merely one generation earlier had nowhere to drift away, except their own minds, which were more dreary than the work, book or ‘serial’ at hand. So bereft of entertainment were they, they sat in front of TV watching transmission static for a minute before the programming began.

Even so, the analysis that your poor attention span is a creation of modern tech is not the correct way to frame the problem. What’s instead happening is that the people who want your attention are not producing anything engaging enough for you not to stray. Once, they could get away because you didn’t have many choices. But now that you have many distractions to choose from, those people or their industries are exposed, and they are trying to blame it on the times.

People have not given up on a great book. They are only bored of acclaimed dull books. They are bored only of monopolies held by a small club of overrated people who produce duds. People were right to get bored of Test cricket, where dull batsmen endured precisely because they were dull, endurance after all being nature’s gift to the ordinary. And of cinema, where stardom was sexually transmitted from star to star. Magazines did not fade because of the phone. Almost all of them perished because they were bad. Once, I read a story on how “more and more people are having orange juice.”

Many things that were once popular are dying not because of low attention spans, but because they are bad, or mediocre, or have long been in decay. Yet, the industries that produce them have again come to the wrong conclusion about what ails them—a shrunk ‘attention span.’ And their solution to the wrong problem is going to create more dumb things in the name of creating stuff for ‘short attention spans.’ And they will then appear to further reduce your attention span.

(Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is, ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’.)