Response: Scientific studies show that the earliest social networks, which came out roughly 20 years ago, have made people’s attention spans a lot shorter. Digital platforms can’t fully explain this tendency; instead, it can be explained by a general rise in sources of distraction. Reason: In 2004, when Facebook was created, psychologist Gloria Mark studied how social media affects people’s attention on computers, using stopwatches or tracking software.
This number goes down to 1 minute and 15 seconds in 2012. The numbers haven’t altered much since 2017–2018, which is 47 seconds. Even though multitasking is widespread, every interruption, such checking your phone’s notifications or reading an email, makes it harder for you to focus and get things done. That is what we call the switching cost.
How do social networks manage to distract our attention?
A research at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania had 136 students taking a written test. The results are very apparent. Some of them were told to turn off their smartphones while others got text messages with critical exam instructions. On average, the results were 20% worse for people who had to deal with these problems. If you don’t have concentration problems, you should be able to focus on one thing at a time in a calm, private place. There are a number of things that can get in the way of your work these days.
For example, your smartphone is always nearby, your company culture looks down on being unavailable and taking too long to respond, the Internet is easy to get to, and information is given quickly. An American professor named Joel Nigg connects this to obesity. This trend has been getting stronger over the past 50 years. A number of things have led to this, such as people living sedentary lives, changes in the supply chain, and cities that make it easier to drive. It’s not only how good the cuisine is.
Do we have a limited attention span per day?
Turning off non-emergency notifications on your phone and just checking your email during certain hours is a solid starting step. But society may need to make big changes, including giving people the right to unplug, to get back on track.
Social networks also depend on ads, and they even make brands pay to have their ads show up on accounts and news feeds at the optimal times and places. The open, non-commercial, and contributing web 2.0 period came to an end with the rise of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter between 2008 and 2010.
They make sure that brands have an audience that is more interested, more focused, and, most importantly, more responsive. We may use the evidence of our activities, like clicks, likes, retweets, shares, comments, and the amount of time spent on a content, to figure out what these responses mean. These signals suggest that we are actively looking, and the platforms say they can connect them to what we will do in the future. Duration and intensity are two important aspects of this new raw material that don’t work well together.
In addition to having an impact on our attention, do social networks have an impact on our memory?
In reality, no one can focus on one thing for a long time in work or school. On the other hand, our attention spans work on their own, thus they can be very wide in everyday life. Because of this, there are several ways to pay attention. Brain 1 works in an automatic, low-cost way by using existing programs and instinctive reactions, while brain 2 helps us solve problems and make decisions.
We often do the least amount of work in everything we do, which leads to misconceptions, cognitive patterns that are hard to overcome, and routines that we can’t break out of. There are two more sets of combinations. Attention might be quite strong but just for a short time. When something comes up that grabs our whole attention but then goes away fast, the alert mode might cause stress and anxiety. Social media has trained us to always respond to fresh alerts (buzz, notifications). 60% of retweets were just reactions to something that shocked, made them laugh, or scandalized them, such the story title, the image, the hashtag, or something else.
Conclusion
They didn’t read the tweets that shared them. Also, you can get acute and lasting attention by playing video games, which use images, gameplay design, storylines, player interaction, and emotions to appeal to all of your senses. Digital systems make awareness and immersion much better sensations of attention. Social media tells us what is surprising and fresh or to be loyal through the filter bubble effect, which shows us stuff that only our friends will see or particular types of content that will autoplay in stories.
A well-designed layout (captology) draws people in and shows off the most interesting elements. For example, the counters below the postings (likes, shares, comments, etc.) show how well we are doing. “Vanity metrics” are the things that make us want to post more and better to get more people to see them. This is the competition between members or brands that is present in every signal we’ve seen. Social networking has become a big part of French culture over time French people of all ages spend an average of 52 minutes a day on social media and texting apps. Generation Z spends an average of two hours and nineteen minutes* a day on social media and texting apps.