Got a minute? Global attention span is narrowing, study reveals
Got a minute? Global
attention span is narrowing, study reveals
Research combed from everything
from movie tickets to social media finds more to focus on but less time to do
so
In 2013 a Twitter global trend would last for an
average of 17.5 hours; in 2016 a trend would last only 11.9 hours.
It’s just as you suspected; the
information age has changed the general attention span. A recently published
study from researchers at the Technical University of Denmark suggests the collective global attention span is
narrowing due to the amount of information that is presented to
the public. Released on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Communications,
the study shows people now have more things to focus on – but often focus on
things for short periods of time.
The researchers studied several
modes of media attention, gathered from several different sources, including
(but not limited to): the past 40 years in movie ticket sales; Google books for
100 years; and more modernly, 2013 to 2016 Twitter data; 2010 to 2018 Google
Trends; 2010 to 2015 Reddit trends; and 2012 to 2017 Wikipedia attention time.
The researchers then created a mathematical model to predict three factors: the
“hotness” of the topic, its progression throughout time in the public sphere
and the desire for a new topic, said Dr Philipp Hövel, an applied mathematics
professor of University College Cork in Ireland.
The empirical data found periods
where topics would sharply capture widespread attention and promptly lose it
just as quickly, except in the cases of publications like Wikipedia and scientific
journals. For example, a 2013 Twitter
global trend would last for an average of 17.5 hours,
contrasted with a 2016 Twitter trend, which would last for only 11.9 hours.
In a press release from the Technical University of Denmark,
Professor Sune Lehmann, who worked on the study, said: “It seems that
the allocated attention time in our collective minds has a certain size but the
cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed.”
“Content is increasing in volume,
which exhausts our attention and our urge for ‘newness’ causes us to
collectively switch between topics more regularly,” said Philipp Lorenz-Spreen
of Max Planck Institute for Human Development that also participated in the
study.
The findings mostly correlate to
the greater public, not the individuals who are seeing and creating the
consumed media, like journalists who must compete in the accelerated news
cycle.
The scientists did not respond to
requests for comment.
Comments
Post a Comment