Do you find it hard to focus your attention on one particular thing? Are you prone to opening Instagram every few minutes despite having a rather tight schedule? Well, you're not alone. Turns out, our attention span is declining and fast. And the Internet is one of the biggest contributors. With the onset of so much technology, not only does our attention gets disrupted due to factors like social media, but it is even affected by things like movie ratings, web searches, online books etc.
Researchers have now figured out that this emerging crisis is occurring due to a fear of missing out or FOMO as most millennials call it, being up to date on social media and knowing everything about news first. "It seems that the allocated attention in our collective minds has a certain size, but that the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed. This would support the claim that it has indeed become more difficult to keep up to date on the news cycle, for example," said one professor.
"We wanted to understand which mechanisms could drive this behaviour. Picturing topics as species that feed on human attention, we designed a mathematical model with three basic ingredients: 'hotness', ageing and the thirst for something new," said one of the researchers. They figured that since there were so many topics to cover, people only focused on one for a little while before moving on to the other. This shows that the sooner people are being made aware of different things the faster they are likely to lose interest in it.
However, this research does not account for attention spans on an individual basis and is more likely to be looked upon as a whole. "Our data only supports the claim that our collective attention span is narrowing. Therefore, as a next step, it would be interesting to look into how this affects individuals, since the observed developments may have negative implications for an individual's ability to evaluate the information they consume," the researcher continued.
In fact, this might not just affect the individual but might even affect the people providing the information. So, a journalist will be required to provide data at an accelerated rate to keep up with others. But in this situation, it is the quality of information that suffers. The researchers now hope to design new communication systems that won't affect the quality of the content provided. Stay tuned for more updates.
