I’m sure that everyone who is reading this has heard that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
Everyone immediately blames phones, with good reason.
Throughout “Stolen Focus” and the podcast “Speaking of Psychology: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD” by the American Psychological Association, attention spans are getting shorter and companies are trying to get people looking at screens more and more.
The author of “Stolen Focus” did an experiment: go without the internet and see the effects. I did something similar.
I couldn’t go completely off the grid: I am in college. I have clubs and extracurriculars that need me to be active on I.M. platforms and I couldn’t give up talking with my family at home. So I gave up something that wouldn’t give me any risk: Facebook.
I thought it was going to be relatively easy. I only used Facebook for checking memories and the occasional scrolling on reels. Piece of cake!
I failed within the first 15 minutes of the five-day fast.
It was at that moment I knew that a time-limit was going to be the only way I got past day one.
And yes, I do have all my social media in its own folder.
I will admit, in days one through three, there were moments where I instinctually opened it up to get away from Instagram, email or whatever else I was doing. Then, I would get frustrated every time I opened it up because I was doing it unconsciously.
The worst part for me though, was not being able to look at the memories.
This interested me because I had lived most of the events, I should have at least remembered them.
Nope, at the stroke of midnight, I felt the itch to open it. Recurring every day throughout the five days.
Then came September 12th. Day four. I was doing better at not opening it. I remember think that this last day will be so easy that maybe I will continue to go days without it.
I checked my email to discover that Facebook was notifying me about what I missed.
The funny thing is, when I ended the fast and opened it back up, I had no message and no close friend update (as far as I know).
This made me think about in the book when the author discussed how companies use infinite scroll and other forms of incentives to keep people hooked and the goal of pushing ads for revenue.
It made me feel like I was missing out on so much over a break that was less than a week.
If I didn’t have the risk associated with some other options, I would consider doing this again. I liked the feeling of having one less social media app to obsess over.
In classes about social media, they tell you about the importance of how to push content forward. How social media promotes brands more than ever before.
This does raise questions for me. When will the endless promotion by companies to keep us hooked end? The podcast discussed how our attention span is shortening and reels and short form content doesn’t make it easier.
In the podcast, the guest Dr. Gloria Mark, said “…’back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. Throughout the years it became shorter. So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds….And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds…’” (“Speaking of Psychology: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD,” America Psychological Association).
So I’ll reiterate my question: When will all the constant distractions and promotions end?
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