I agree with the sentiment, but the methodology here seems suspect to say the least. I mean, in their own words: > The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion

I agree with the sentiment, but the methodology here seems suspect to say the least. I mean, in their own words: > The authors evaluated a total of 43 billion tweets and analyzed the top 50 trending hashtags in the world every hour on the hour, from 2013 to 2016. They then calculated the time the hashtags remained popular and found that in 2013, a hashtag remained in the top 50 list for an average of 17.5 hours, but the figure had dropped to 11.9 hours by 2016. It's based on how long a hashtag stays popular on Twitter. That's not a good source of data for something like this. For one thing, it's bloody Twitter, a service where topics change very rapidly and posts are at most 280 characters long. Not exactly an environment conductive to deep thinking or lengthy session times. Secondly, it doesn't really show attention span declining as much as it does the over saturation of media nowadays. New stuff is coming out all the time now, whether its news, movies, games, TV shows, music, books or anything else. There's just more to discuss, and less time to discuss it. Hell, in games alone, we're approaching E3 right now. In that timeframe, it's likely at least 100 new games will be announced across systems, and many more will have new trailers, concept art, fact sheets and other info released. Popular hashtags on Twitter for games will probably change every few minutes as a result. This research just showed that when more stuff is released/documented, popular topics change rapidly day in and day out.