The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter

I credit a lot of changes I made over the last few years to courses like Learning How to Learn (Oakley, Sejnowski) and books like Deep Work (Newport) and Mastery (Greene) in helping to bring me back to realize the importance of uninterrupted blocks of hard, focused work. That coupled with moments of quiet time away from devices so that I can let my mind kind of just wander and process life has made life actually more fulfilling.

I quit Facebook, Twitter, and only check Instagram once every few days. I'm not totally 'clean' since I'll still spend time on YouTube and Reddit during moments of frustration, but I think it's important not to beat oneself up when one 'cheats.' After all, it's not completely a new phenomenon. There's always been things like books, newspapers, TV, radio to distract our attention.

But maybe it just feels a bit different since some of the smartest people in the world are working everyday to make sure we're looking at the thing they're working on in a very calculated fashion. That plus the fact that sometimes it feels like you're supposed to know so much of what's going on in the world and environment around you. But really, so many topics are so much more complicated than a simple cursory look that it feels kind of fruitless to jump into it when it realistically takes hundreds of hours to truly understand it.

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.

Anyway, this brings to mind one good thing about Hacker News: while breaking stories make it to the front page, so does older content worthy of discussion. We need more people to care about curation of what might otherwise be forgotten.

"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."

This doesn't mean that attention span is shrinking. It just means that there are tons more tweets and hashtags in 2016 as there are in 2013.

Just like with movies, the article mentioned. It has nothing to do with "attention span" since Endgame is a 3 hour long film. It just means that the movie industry is producing a lot more movies/blockbusters and the time a blockbluster can stay at the top is limited because another blockbuster is bound to release soon after.

It's like in the past we only had the "classics" as college subjects. Now we have physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, etc. And the new subjects means that our attention span got shorter. Which is absurd.

I think human attention span got shorter, but the article isn't really arguing that or it isn't arguing it well. And I'm not sure if human attention span getting shorter is necessarily a bad thing. Why sit through commercials, intros and so much filler/fluff in most media? As long as you are able to concentrate on things that deserve concentration, nothing wrong with short attention span for fluff.

I think scientific research has had its own trends for a long time now, though they probably are more local than what the author is writing about.

I can recall a conversation I had with an acquaintance at an APS fluid dynamics conference last year about how trendy the broad field of fluid dynamics can be. 5 years ago it was all about "dynamic mode decomposition" (which hasn't died yet but is on the wane) and now it's machine learning.

You can be confident a-priori that most machine learning studies in fluid dynamics aren't going to do much of value because their "training data" is deficient in some way, whether the number of data points or the variation of an important variable. (There are other problems as well but that one seems most accessible to HN folks.) These more fundamental issues are not well appreciated, probably because they are hard and not sexy.

It's a lot easier and more exciting to try $buzzword for $X. (If you've missed the trend you always could try comparing $buzzwordA and $buzzwordB for $X. One talk at a conference I'm going to next week fits this template!)

The internet has been commercialized to the point where it’s no longer exciting to browse. I stay on HN and mostly read reactions to posts without opening the post link.

Attention economy unintentionally promotes "human downgrading"

Great opportunity to innovate on apps and services that promotes reversal of human downgrading.

First, time in the top 50 tags is shorter in 2016 than 2013. Ok, but what increase in volume of tweets was there? How many more tags? If you have 1M tags vs 10M with a fixed top N (where N=50) and even though N is relatively small in comparison to the tool so we're talking real outliers, I think you'll find that absent any other differences time in the top 50 will decrease.

Second, why are we talking about "attention" with Twitter as our basis for comparison? The very nature of the platform is people saying shallow but catchy things who like the sound of their own voice finding an echo chamber to assert their personal identities by RTing said tweet. In what world was or is Twitter a forum for any kind of attention let alone debate?

Third, catchy phrases in books. Um... there is a long lead time between writing a book, having it published and getting it in the hands of people. Now you can get a tweet out to 100M people in several seconds.

Holding people accountable. Ok, good, something worth talking about. If we've learned nothing from the Trump presidency it's this: there's only so much outrage you can hold on to and every day there's another story about lying, some scandal, fanning the flames of racists who have never gotten over losing the ability to own people, etc and one story just drowns out the previous one. I'm honestly not sure how you deal with this problem but it's a big one.

As for seeking journalism with more background research and quality, it's been tried. People don't want it and, more importantly, they're not willing to pay for it. You also have media conglomerates who pose as "journalists" who are anything but. Like, oh I don't know, anything owned by a Murdoch.

The conclusion seems shallow. I'll just leave it at that.

I actually see this as a fundamental problem of human nature. Humans are inherently... tribal. We naturally stick to people like ourselves, culturally and even physically. That sense of belonging is a key part of social structure. Dan Carlin talks about this in his Hardcore History series on WWI (a 6 part series--30+ hours of content--called A Blueprint for Armageddon which is totally worth listening to) when he talks about the Armenian genocide. His point is that pretty much everyone is guilty of genocide in history. Not that that excuses it but we shouldn't make out that any particular example is an exception or something that we ourselves (or, rather, our ancestors) weren't guilty of.

What happened in Europe after the Renaissance was the idea formed of nation states. While this might've been loosely associated with some tribal identity, in time it transcended it and it resulted in a number of revolutions deposing an old order that was typically a monarchy: French, American, Russian to name 3.

Because this is what many of us grew up with I think we consider this normal but I question this assumption. It seems like it's more of an exception than the norm. Many say the US is increasingly polarized and there's a clash of cultures. While I won't disagree with that, maybe this is simply the people reverting to a more natural state of tribal loyalty. It seems like it's easy to fan these flames as many opportunists have and will.

So perhaps it's better to say that social media makes it easier for people to live in bubbles that affirm their own world views. And I think Twitter is largely irrelevant in all this.