Did you know that the average human attention span is 8.25 seconds! Humans have shorter attention spans than goldfish (who come in at a whopping 9 seconds!). Wait, what?
According to some sources[i] the average human attention span has decreased nearly 25% between the years 2000 to 2015. By the time you’ve read these facts, something is likely already competing for your attention. Well, hopefully I didn’t lose you to that video of some dude power washing decades of filth off a late 80s Chevy Iroc Z28 found in a rural North Carolina barn. Deceptively satisfying, I know. If you can, stick with me for at least a few more seconds!
Influencers and marketers know that people can only pay attention in short snippets of time. Marketers also know that consumers don’t like to retain a lot of information. Accordingly, marketers have long been feeding consumers a steady diet of advertisements that seek to influence behavior, specifically consumption behavior, by communicating in very short, simple, and entertaining ways. The short attention span of consumers has been trained by influencers and advertisers that benefit from the culture of consumption by which they reinforce. See, click, buy...repent? nah,...let's repeat!
Take a pause and reflect on this for a moment. Our fast-paced, digitally enabled, and enhanced media culture is continuously stimulating our desire for instant gratification. Think of it as a quick hit of caffeine or better yet, dopamine, every few seconds. Unless we deliberately choose to power down and decouple from the matrix, we’re constantly bombarded with images, text, music, aromas, and much more every moment of the day, determined to capture our attention, and intentionally seeking to influence our short and long-term thoughts and behaviors. If that’s not being plugged into the matrix, then I don’t know what is.
Listen, I’m not above scrolling. Believe me, I’ve been there, and I get it. I too have scrolled and sat captivated by clips, reels, and posts. You know the one’s I’m referring to, the clips that lure you in with fashion and fitness (i.e., the clothes that you can’t afford, or that elusive body image – “if I just do a few more planks and burpees”), or the reel that cuts to the chase with a six-month home remodeling project condensed to a 30-second reveal (i.e., I need that swanky backyard barbeque and modern kitchen, like now!), or the post appealing to your inner child with a slow-motion camera reel that follows the smooth sexy lines of an exotic car with cool music beats to boot (i.e., hey, a guy can still dream can’t he?).
I give a lot of credit to the creators and influencers out there. They are certainly creative and understand how to charm us and capture our attention (and more importantly, our precious time!). I’ll admit that scrolling can be entertaining. It can offer a moment of needed, yet temporary reprieve from the responsibilities of modern living. And, on occasion, it can lead to some practical insight or perspective that can be used.
Scrolling can have utility. But if I’m being honest with myself, and we are all being honest with each other, let’s face it, scrolling can be an addictive time sink that yields little positive impact on our lives, and comes with an unintentional emotional and psychological price tag. Have you ever walked away from scrolling feeling lesser than, or worse, anxious, depressed, ashamed, confused, or lonely? The more we bombard our brains with flash in the pan images of perfection, we lose a little bit of our compass bearing on our true north setting, that is, who we are and what we truly desire to be (as opposed to being influenced to be something “better,” through the barrage of curated lifestyles created by people who aren’t even really living that life).
Unfortunately for the United States, although consumer protections exist, “on the books,” they are not as protective or as policed as they are in other countries. The responsibly for providing discerning evaluation and critical judgement on social media influencers and advertising claims and its messaging resides largely with us, the consumers.
From another perspective, we’ve all seen those incessant pharmaceutical commercials that interrupt our favorite programs. I’m willing to wager that you know by heart, more than one of the pharma drug commercials catchy tunes and hum it as you go about your daily regimen of household tasks like making dinner, washing dishes, folding laundry, and taking out the trash. We hear these tunes more often than we hear radio-play of our favorite artists’ songs. If you find yourself humming along and breaking into dance, hey, don’t sweat it, you’re not alone. Those songs were produced to burrow deep inside your subconsciousness and hang around for a while as you mull over whether you may be experiencing a symptom or side effect. Cue that catchy jingle to a once forgotten song. Sorry, Taylor Swift! The pharma industry has this category of music cornered. And the Grammy goes to…
Today we are Creator and Consumer, But to What End?
Consider for a moment humanity’s ancient peoples. Imagine how silly and humorous it would be to go back thousands of years and witness ancient people flip rapidly from one parchment page to the next, rolling their eyes in disdain or disgust, as they scanned the scrolls for the latest philosophy, technology, or trend. Now, of course I’m using a play on words to draw distinction between our precious ancient writings and our modern version of ‘scrolling’ on social media as an allegory.
Ancient scrolls had a deeper purpose. They were used for recording history, sharing and preserving literature, and for marking ceremonial and religious purposes. In this way, scrolls were, and continue to be, held sacred. Imagine thousands of years from now, a future generation accesses a long forgotten data cloud, only to witness and interpret our society through the lens of TikTok reels and memes? With proper context, at least they may see that we had a sense of humor. It will be interesting to see how long our current fascination and temptation of scrolling will stand up in our current sands of time, before we rediscover our intergenerational desire for preserving ourselves and the past.
How we capture, share, and celebrate, archive, and narrate life today can feel manufactured and transactional. Certainly, there is method to our madness and for most people, social media is but a tool for self-expression, exploration, entertainment, and communication. But as our data gets stored and backed up onto modern-day scrolls (i.e., “the cloud”), we must wonder whether we are advancing humanity with dignity and wisdom, or simply streaming our innate wants and desires for attention. Tik-Tok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and other social media tools are not necessarily the problem. What gets posted, shared, liked, criticized, and celebrated on social media reflects [some of] society’s underlying needs, wants, desires, and values. Social media is a mirror to our existing human condition and spirit, in all its dysfunction, divisiveness, glory and angst.
Marketers, social media influencers, even some newscasters, politicians, and business leaders understand this and want us to stay tuned in, and on point, with their message. The short-cycle attention span has led us to a culture of jumping from a breaking news announcement to the latest dance fad, to a political rebuttal, and back to another breaking news tidbit within minutes, if not seconds. As multimedia domains compete for our eyeballs and ears, our attention span wanes, homing in on the more shocking, fantastic, or unbelievable to maintain our thirst for egoistic gratification. Yet within our psyche and neural operating system, we yearn for exercising deeper personal connection and critical thinking. It’s in our nature to want to experience life through our senses, in the moment, as well as through our innate ability to create, deconstruct, evaluate, and reason. Exercising all elements of our human intellect enriches our understanding and fulfillment of life.
Some might say that our virtual pursuit of happiness is fraught with clear and present issues, including social, economic, energy, and environmental impacts. Behind every scroll, swipe, and send; behind every clip, reel, and post; behind every like, love, and celebrate; behind every notification and nagging pharma song stuck in our head; there is one of the largest energy and industrial complexes in human history, standing up the “scrolls of our time.” Our data-driven, hyper-digital, scrolling society is enabled by the cloud, and enormous datacenters and high performance computing centers that provide the fuel that feeds our frenzied and fanatical foray into the scrolling abyss.
On a consumptive level we may not see the direct correlation between scrolling, swiping, and sending and the enormous draw of power that is required to ensure new content loads every millisecond. In aggregate however, billions of emojis and likes begin to quickly add up, as most major social media platforms consume more energy on a monthly basis than what some countries consume annually. In fact, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) account for 6 to 10% of global electricity consumption, or 4% of our greenhouse gas emissions.[ii][iii]
A Shot Across the Bow at ‘Righteous Pontification’
“I stand corrected.” Have you ever, ‘stand corrected’? If I were to post a message on social media, or reply to every post that caught my attention, chances are, if someone wanted to counter my ‘point of view’ (POV), I would stand corrected. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. We all have certain POVs that we want to make and let the world know. But in the past few years social media has become increasingly toxic.
Our screens are a veil protecting the illusion that we can spew and spout whatever, whenever, wherever we want about just about any topic known to humankind and then some. For a time, perhaps this provided a necessary state of release, call it a mass experiment on human therapy on the heel of Covid. But look deeper, there is something more sinister and devious to what’s happening. While social media has its utility, it has also provoked a dark side of human emotion. In some cases the people we know, our family, friends, and neighbors, have become estranged, unhinged, and unkind.
I have deliberately slowed my active social media participation over the past couple of years. It has become clear that the modality for sharing knowledge and communication had become tainted with biased code, centered more on uncompromising POVs promulgating mis-and-disinformation, and operated by a tech machinery whose values and intentions are greatly obfuscated.
Many posts I continue to see now are what I call, Righteous Pontification. To be clear and honest, I have been a Righteous Pontificator before. It’s easy to do so, and to get caught up in wanting to be seen as smart, and on the right side of an argument. The problem with this in a digital age is that the utility of most social media platforms is limited. If you can’t get your point made in 240 characters or less, then, well, don’t even try. The modality magnifies the madness – a self-centered communication marked by cute selfies, memes, and videos that celebrate short, curt, incomplete rants that don’t lead to any real resolve. Before you judge that I’m completely cynical, let me disclose that I certainly scroll, get lost within the content rabbit hole, and laugh out loud at videos, images, and the happenstances of others’ lives.
Amid our distractions, it’s easy to get caught up in pointless scrolling, or worse, seeking out the subtexts by which we can extend our pontifications so that we can feed the ego, get that hit of dopamine, and momentarily feel relevant. I don’t see a comment thread on social media as communication, so much as it is righteous pontification. Sure, there is language and the perception of dialog, but isn’t most of this really ego jousting, seeking those “gotcha” moments among friends and peers? Even if that doesn’t sound like your personality, do you at least think about the refrain you would post, if the ego allowed you to do so? I’ve found all of this to be quite exhausting and pointless, leading to our own distorted sense of reality and relationships.
Discovering Deeper Truths About Ourselves, and What’s Sacred During Our Sands of Time
We all know the phrase, “life is short,” and have probably said it many times. We also know, as we age, that time be fleeting, passing through our hands like loose sand at the beach. The more we try to grasp for control, the quicker time can pass us by. Perhaps I’m crossing over into the righteous pontification realm here, but our time does not have to be so elusive. We may not control time, but we do have control over the quality of the time that we do have available to us. We can choose to aimlessly scroll, or we can invest ourselves in something more meaningful that brings us greater joy, and serves the people and world around us. The choice is ours from a consumer perspective. From a creator perspective, we also have a choice. We can choose to leverage technology and the platforms we have available to us, to foster more meaningful connections, practical and sensible content.
We need to stop accepting the notion that people’s attention span is just a few seconds or less. In reality the most compelling, challenging, courageous and caring questions that should (and need to) be asked of ourselves and society will require a level of cerebral immersion that most people don’t [necessarily] want to exert personal energy toward.
The more we push tough questions that require deep cognitive immersion away, the further we distance ourselves (individually and collectively) from seeking truth, garnering wisdom, and achieving a deeper sense of understanding for life. Sure, it’s much easier and a lot more entertaining to focus our limited time and attention span on the fleeting and fickle ideas and messages that stream onto our screens each day. But if we only accept and settle for what entertains us, we minimize our potential to elevate our intellect to prosper, let alone to be enlightened.
Redefining Prosperity: Examining Planet Pragmatism in the Digital Age
Scrolling is not inherently bad. It can certainly serve as a form and function as entertainment, as helpful content and information, and as a way to connect and communication. It pays to be self-aware of ‘mindless scrolling,’ and the toll it takes on your mental health, not too mention the drain on time it can be.
We understand that social media is not a crystal ball that can, consistently and accurately, foretell the future or provide us with the needed intuition and wisdom to navigate change. Those visceral reactions are tools that we already have, embedded in our DNA. They stem from our gut and our mind, guiding our daily behaviors and decisions. Social media feeds our programming in a ritualistic sense, whereas our innate wisdom guides are deeper sense of purpose, meaning, and survival.
As consumers, our digital footprint has a material economic, social, energy, and environmental impact on our individual lives and greater society. Although our individual scrolling contribution to CO2 emissions may seem insignificant, the reality is that billions of views of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour videos add up to a significant amount of power required to store and access all of those fan favorite moments, on demand. We live in a frenzied on-demand digital culture that loves to consume data, and subsequently, energy and natural resources. Remember that data that is created, stored, shared, curated, etc. equates to power demand. In the U.S., 60% of the electricity generation continues to be derived from fossil fuels – coal, natural gas, petroleum and other gases. About 19% of the electricity is nuclear generated and about 21% is generated from renewable feedstocks.
Although our modern consumer culture has perfected the art of attention grabbing marketing, advertisement, and influencer techniques – there are deeper truths, thought-provoking issues and challenges, and human need for identity, belonging, purpose, and preservation – which require humanity to invest our time wisely into more nuanced human-to-human dialog, community discussion and development. Will (and can) the egoism and perception of individuality baked into our digital culture give rise to a more lasting opportunity for humans to be seen, heard, respected and valued?
[i][i] Source: Kesherim, Ruben. October 5, 2023. “Average Human Attention Span (By Age, Gender & race). Supportive Care ABA. https://www.supportivecareaba.com/statistics/average-attention-span#:~:text=The%20average%20human%20has%20an,of%2032%20to%2048%20minutes.
[ii] Source: Bruck, Hannah. July 16, 2024. Texas Public Policy Foundation. “The Energy Cost of Social Media.” https://www.texaspolicy.com/the-energy-cost-of-social-media/
[iii] Source: Vreeswijk, Simon. Shift. November 27, 2023. “The Carbon Footprint of the Internet: How Your Data Usage Emits CO2.” https://shift.com/blog/news/the-carbon-footprint-of-the-internet/
Comments