Attention, please.

Brain rot – the Oxford Word of the Year, 2024. Skibidi, galaxy brain, the list unfortunately goes on. The concern about the shortening of attention spans in young children started years ago, but the concern about that of adults in recent years and months has become increasingly popular. One TED Talk video on YouTube, titled “How to get your brain to focus”, has 18 million views, and another, titled “How to make learning as addictive as social media”, has 9.5 million. Indeed, the concern for focus levels is (unfortunately) supported by researchers. One study shows that over the past two decades, the length of time spent on a single computer screen before switching to another has shortened from 2.5 minutes to 47 seconds. Culturally and inwardly seeking, we are realising the threat our devices are to our ability to focus. However, attention is a complex phenomenon that varies depending on the task and differs from person to person. So no, we don’t have a worse attention span than that of a goldfish (contrary to myths circulating in the 2010s); however, you’re right to observe that you have evolved. We all have. According to Attention Restoration Theory, goal-directed attention is affected the most by mental fatigue (the ability to sift through relevant and irrelevant information in day-to-day life), while stimulus-driven attention is minimally affected or not at all affected by mental fatigue. Mental fatigue is compounded in an attention economy, almost tangibly. On a positive note, the theory posits that engaging with stimuli such as environmental stimuli (nature) has a positive association with combating fatigue (giving the phrase ‘touch-grass’ a whole new meaning). In fact, after undergoing medical surgery, patients who rested in rooms overlooking trees recovered better than those in rooms with only a view of a brick wall. However, our inability to focus on certain tasks could have unforeseen effects, such as impacts on the economy. New York Times writer Kyla Scanlon outlines this by describing how attention directly converts into capital through the sampling of social media influence and the overwhelming influence of viral narratives on the world around us. The danger of investing energy and capital in systems that cater to a low-attention-span consumer is the impact it has on our broader systems—the signals it sends to politicians on how they can capture our attention. Alas, leaders emerge who prioritise narratives or shorthand rhetoric and count on long-lasting success. They live and thrive on the public being too overwhelmed by the leadership’s constant narrative changes to hold any one act to account. A dangerous string of populist, reminiscent politicians have emerged from this cycle, ones that have recognised the ability to use our attention (or lack thereof) against us. The Argentine president, Milei, U.S. President Trump, and politician Elon Musk, adjacent to the latter, embody this description—the focus on immediate return versus long-term interests for the country. The entertainment-driven politics focused on campaigning on symbolic policies (e.g., Mass deportation) versus nuanced policies to address multiple issues simultaneously. On an individual level, the attention economy facilitates the immediate resolution of problems of inconvenience. Fixing your desire for watching a specific type of content at your fingertips and then being fed 50 more videos that you didn’t know existed, but now you need. Or hungry? There’s an app that provides an immediate solution; no need to spend more than 5 minutes figuring out how to get your next meal. Need to get somewhere fast? No need for a bus, we have an app for that! What this encourages is a lack of problem-solving, consideration, or, more accurately, friction. Bill Gates first coined the term “frictionless capitalism” in the 90s, which anticipated this, the reduction of minor life problems that the internet would solve. Except, cooking dinner at home with your roommate, deciding on a meal that suits what you both feel like eating, and then walking to the supermarket in your pyjamas together may be friction, but it is an unreplaceable connection-building and soul-enriching experience. A frictionless society is a lonely one. And it is particularly dangerous for young people to live in before their executive functions (major cognitive abilities such as focusing) are fully developed. Friction builds trust and builds a foundation to walk through the rest of your life with. Optimistically, a lack of friction and an attention economy are side effects of a young, globalised system. We will never know how to navigate a new frontier before we’ve dipped our toes in it, or in the case of the U.S., dunked our heads under. However, what’s important is how we navigate the future with the information on the frontier that we currently have. As we grow older as a globalised society, we will be able to hold each other to account. Like the Industrial Revolution or mass manufacturing in China, the invention of the iPhone and unsupervised Omegle visits by 9-year-olds, it felt as though that thing would upend the future of our communities, our lives, our culture. (The fear that our adult lives would be full of highly inappropriate online experiences after one visit to Omegle was an overwhelming concern for my young classmates and me.) But we navigated, we adjusted, we regulated. We ensured industries (an ongoing practice in domestic policies of any country today) were balanced between offshore and onshore production based on the strengths and weaknesses of each country. And needless to say, we got rid of Omegle. This issue of attention, as it directly involves our psyches on a mass scale, is undeniably scarier and threatens a more profound impact than these events have on our lives. Being worried is understandable and human. But our functions, hopefully, will be able to adapt similarly, even if it takes longer to adjust relative to the greatness of the issue. Kids will grow up with parents who now have access to more information than they did yesterday and the day before that. The most crucial practice moving forward is that we ourselves detach from the overwhelming overvaluing of the media-verse and develop habits to encourage this.

References

The Center for Brain, Mind and Society. (2024, April 2). Are attention spans actually decreasing? The Center for Brain, Mind and Society

Ulrich R. 1984