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>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Have there been any studies to back up this

>There is also the issue of declining attention spans as people consume snackable content on their mobile devices. Have there been any studies to back up this pervasive idea of declining attention spans? I'm asking honestly, not combatively. It has some signs of "common sense" beliefs that aren't true or useful: generalizing over a large group, lamenting something lost, and focusing on something poorly defined. Of course, those qualities don't mean it's a false belief, but they do make me want hard data before I believe it. Especially because I've seen signs of the opposite with TV shows. Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect.

ghaff 6y ago
Not peer-reviewed research but we do lots of tracking of things like marketing materials in various media. Outside organizations do this sort of work as well. And we see a clear decline in the length of content that people want to consume. I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.
valarauko 6y ago
> * Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect. * Tangential anecdote: I have a friend who's a writer for Netflix & Amazon shows, and the streaming services have fine grained detail on subscriber behavior - at what point in the episode do people tend to stop watching, etc. The streaming service uses this data to create specific models for how shows and individual episodes should be structured to maximize audience retention. The writers are given specific instructions of how many and how frequently "payoffs" need to be peppered throughout the episode. So while shows today might be 45+ minutes long, they're also not written like shows in the past.
setr 6y ago
I'm not sure overall-length would be affected by "short attention span" -- it would be "entertainment spikes" or I suppose "average time between significant events". Perhaps the best term is pacing -- how fast does the story flow? You can keep someone with ADHD fully engaged with the same topic indefinitely, if you can keep the pacing fast enough to hold their attention. Video games and Casinos being the king of this. So you'd expect slower films/tv to fall out, and things to get faster and faster -- packing more in shorter timeslots, with less slowdowns for things like background, general discussion, landscape shots, etc. From that perspective, I'd say action flicks are definitely getting faster; bay's transformers being the king of it -- so quickly paced you can't even understand what the hell is going on; just the "feeling" of mechanical combat but it's really just a blur of sounds and machinery. Marvel too has basically dropped all pretense of a real "plot" -- it more a sequence of random flashy combat and big landscapes/weaponry/powers that suddenly ends with the credits. I'm not sure if however you could say intentionally slower genres like political dramas are getting faster by necessity of the masses' devolving minds; I don't watch enough of the newer ones to say. But even comparing something like West Wing to House of Cards, the latter is clearly more "packed".

ghaff 6y ago

Not peer-reviewed research but we do lots of tracking of things like marketing materials in various media. Outside organizations do this sort of work as well. And we see a clear decline in the length of content that people want to consume. I agree that scripted TV hasn't really decreased in length. On the other hand, a lot of video content being consumed is shorter pieces on YouTube.

valarauko 6y ago

> * Streaming services don't have scheduled programming, so shows can be as long as they want. Different episodes of the same show don't have to be the same length. "Seasons" can be any number of episodes. With that freedom, a lot of shows are now 45+ minutes long (equivalent to hour-long shows with commercials). If the average attention span were shrinking, this isn't what I'd expect. * Tangential anecdote: I have a friend who's a writer for Netflix & Amazon shows, and the streaming services have fine grained detail on subscriber behavior - at what point in the episode do people tend to stop watching, etc. The streaming service uses this data to create specific models for how shows and individual episodes should be structured to maximize audience retention. The writers are given specific instructions of how many and how frequently "payoffs" need to be peppered throughout the episode. So while shows today might be 45+ minutes long, they're also not written like shows in the past.

setr 6y ago

I'm not sure overall-length would be affected by "short attention span" -- it would be "entertainment spikes" or I suppose "average time between significant events". Perhaps the best term is pacing -- how fast does the story flow? You can keep someone with ADHD fully engaged with the same topic indefinitely, if you can keep the pacing fast enough to hold their attention. Video games and Casinos being the king of this. So you'd expect slower films/tv to fall out, and things to get faster and faster -- packing more in shorter timeslots, with less slowdowns for things like background, general discussion, landscape shots, etc. From that perspective, I'd say action flicks are definitely getting faster; bay's transformers being the king of it -- so quickly paced you can't even understand what the hell is going on; just the "feeling" of mechanical combat but it's really just a blur of sounds and machinery. Marvel too has basically dropped all pretense of a real "plot" -- it more a sequence of random flashy combat and big landscapes/weaponry/powers that suddenly ends with the credits. I'm not sure if however you could say intentionally slower genres like political dramas are getting faster by necessity of the masses' devolving minds; I don't watch enough of the newer ones to say. But even comparing something like West Wing to House of Cards, the latter is clearly more "packed".