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Although the attention span myth is one of those things that is taken to be almost idiomatic, there’s actually very little empirical evidence for it. There’s n

Although the attention span myth is one of those things that is taken to be almost idiomatic, there’s actually very little empirical evidence for it. There’s no such thing as an ‘average’ attention span, and even for those individual tasks it would be very much context dependent (where I’m sitting, what I’m doing at the time, my general opinion of the author, the mood I’m in). It’s a nice story, and it will invariably generate a nice stream of anecdata in a comments section like this, but there’s very little evidence for it at all.

dumpsterlid 4y ago
This is an extremely crucial point. Though I do think social media apps are designed to be addictive in a negative way, the narrative that they are destroying our attention spans has absolutely no backing in science and yet it is taken almost as common sense.
- jmt_ 4y ago
  Totally agree with both of you. I don't see this issue in terms of "attention span" per se, rather we now have an ever-present device that most often contains software engineered to grab as much of our attention as it possibly can. I can't think of anything similar past generations had that was close to this in terms of magnitude and accessibility. We all know the rat in a box will tap the dopamine button as many times as it can and now, unprecedentedly, we carry that button in our pocket every day.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    The printed book which could be shrunk to be carried in a pocket. It was such a disruptive technology it lead to fake news plunging Europe into a century of wars and genocides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
MrYellowP 4y ago
There's no such thing as an average. Dividing sums isn't real. We can't even measure what attracts the attention of people. We can't track their eyes. We haven't been improving our techniques for catching someones attention and focus for the last decades+. We don't try to keep people hooked to our websites by making sure they stay engaged. FarmVille is a only a myth, too. "Endless scrolling" doesn't actually exist either. Chatbots on websites, which try to engage you in a conversation within seconds of inactivity, don't actually do so to keep your attention on the site. Man ... If all your understanding is based solely on data other people have gathered, then you not only are completely unaware of all the potential data that hasn't been gathered yet, you also have only very little understanding of pretty much anything out there.
blindmute 4y ago
There's simply no empirical evidence that you love your wife/mother, so it would be foolish to believe that you do. Until a study is funded there's just no way for you to know. Trust science
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >There's simply no empirical evidence that you love your wife/mother https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2954158/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2954158/ Cute quip, but wrong.
Graffur 4y ago
The thing is that people can feel it themselves and see it in other people. It would be great if it is studied but there is something there.

dumpsterlid 4y ago

This is an extremely crucial point. Though I do think social media apps are designed to be addictive in a negative way, the narrative that they are destroying our attention spans has absolutely no backing in science and yet it is taken almost as common sense.

jmt_ 4y ago
Totally agree with both of you. I don't see this issue in terms of "attention span" per se, rather we now have an ever-present device that most often contains software engineered to grab as much of our attention as it possibly can. I can't think of anything similar past generations had that was close to this in terms of magnitude and accessibility. We all know the rat in a box will tap the dopamine button as many times as it can and now, unprecedentedly, we carry that button in our pocket every day.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  The printed book which could be shrunk to be carried in a pocket. It was such a disruptive technology it lead to fake news plunging Europe into a century of wars and genocides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion

MrYellowP 4y ago

There's no such thing as an average. Dividing sums isn't real. We can't even measure what attracts the attention of people. We can't track their eyes. We haven't been improving our techniques for catching someones attention and focus for the last decades+. We don't try to keep people hooked to our websites by making sure they stay engaged. FarmVille is a only a myth, too. "Endless scrolling" doesn't actually exist either. Chatbots on websites, which try to engage you in a conversation within seconds of inactivity, don't actually do so to keep your attention on the site. Man ... If all your understanding is based solely on data other people have gathered, then you not only are completely unaware of all the potential data that hasn't been gathered yet, you also have only very little understanding of pretty much anything out there.

blindmute 4y ago

There's simply no empirical evidence that you love your wife/mother, so it would be foolish to believe that you do. Until a study is funded there's just no way for you to know. Trust science

thrown_22 4y ago
>There's simply no empirical evidence that you love your wife/mother https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2954158/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2954158/ Cute quip, but wrong.

Graffur 4y ago

The thing is that people can feel it themselves and see it in other people. It would be great if it is studied but there is something there.