3 ms·

No need to panic: there is some research available. I found this article on The Verge an interesting read: Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter, https://w

No need to panic: there is some research available. I found this article on The Verge an interesting read: Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter, https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps... . It links to an article in the New York Times, citing a study that lasted approximately 20 years. (No direct link, because paywall) Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.

anolog0 3y ago
Thanks for the response. That's an interesting study, but is it implying that we spend less time on websites because our attention spans are worse, or our attention spans are worse because most websites are more easily scanned, digested, and moved on from? Obviously the web itself has changed a lot in the past 20 years, not just people's supposed attention spans. Honestly, ignoring that entirely, I don't see why we would have to measure attention span through a metric like duration spent on websites. Is it really so hard to measure it just by giving people a task and paying attention to when their focus shifts from it? And, supposing people are generally just as good at sitting down and doing a task as they were 20 years ago (so long as they don't get interrupted by their phones), is there something else people mean when they talk about attention spans getting worse?

anolog0 3y ago

Thanks for the response. That's an interesting study, but is it implying that we spend less time on websites because our attention spans are worse, or our attention spans are worse because most websites are more easily scanned, digested, and moved on from? Obviously the web itself has changed a lot in the past 20 years, not just people's supposed attention spans. Honestly, ignoring that entirely, I don't see why we would have to measure attention span through a metric like duration spent on websites. Is it really so hard to measure it just by giving people a task and paying attention to when their focus shifts from it? And, supposing people are generally just as good at sitting down and doing a task as they were 20 years ago (so long as they don't get interrupted by their phones), is there something else people mean when they talk about attention spans getting worse?