We are in the age of social media, AI and continuous availability of information. An information is available instantaneously on whichever topic that we think of and no matter the geographical location. Yet we increasingly see, that people, and particularly the younger generation (a similar pattern is also observable in older generations) do not want to spend much time or give much attention to any topic. And this results in not learning anything.
Now the question arises, is it really true that attention span is decreasing in this age? I can see many examples including of myself. Earlier I used to pick up a book and read it till the end. The book was selected of course based on my interest, but no matter how I start feeling while reading it (or get bored while reading), I would always finish it. Nowadays I do still pick up the books (specifically talking about non-academic books here) but I do not remember when did I last finished reading a book. My generation at least got the habit of reading the books in the childhood, while I find newer generation not ready to read the books at all. I literally find many students not pick up even the academic books when they are told to do so. There question is " Why would I read a book when #### (earlier Wikipedia, Google and now Chatgpt) gives me all the required answers? " I do not have answer to this question.
Let us observe another example. Previously people used to watch YouTube videos which were at least > 10 mins long. This might be for the purpose of education or entertainment, that is not the point here. Today every platform has a shortform content. YouTube has YouTube shorts, Instagram has reels and tiktok (banned in India) has itself. And considering the analytics, they are most watched over the long form content. It is evident that people nowadays do not want to dedicate even 10 mins to watch a full length video. They are more than happy to scroll the 100 reels in those 10 mins.
Now above two examples are anecdotal. We need to check if this is true or not based on specific measurements and data. Also we need to discuss what can be solutions to fix this lack of attention span. And importantly why we need to fix this attention span? Is there really a need to do so?
I might do this in next blog if my attention span allows me to write another blog! 😁
