What happened to our attention spans?

Daryl sent me fascinating article last week about how our brains are re-wiring because of how we're using them. Some paraphrased excerpts:

• The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish. Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things...we can get into a habit of not concentrating.
• Twitter reduces our thoughts to just 140 characters. 12seconds.tv does it in twelve seconds. The average length of the 12 billion online videos consumed by US users in May? 2.7 minutes.
• The more words you add to a page the more people skim it. Our short attention spans can’t handle long articles and we end up just skipping to the bottom.
• Shorter blog posts or posts chunked with headlines, bullet points or images get more comments than posts with lengthy blocks of text.
• Television, the internet and other external stimuli has rewired our brains to make it harder to absorb information that doesn’t come in bite-sized chunks. Our brains are ready to jump to the next stimuli before we’ve fully absorbed the first.

MY individual take-aways:

• I've read and heard the hub bub about how the internet is making us stupid. Or, how people need to get a life and turn off the computer. In this article Josh says "We need to stop focusing on getting so much information, so quickly. It’s okay to miss some things. It’s okay not to put up a post about every breaking story as soon as it happens. It’s okay not to tweet everything you see or do. It’s okay not to have 5,000 friends." I wouldn't disagree with what he says here, but our reality doesn't and isn't all or nothing.
• The internet isn't making us dumb, it's making us different. And, it's not that we just need to unplug to stay smart, it's that we need to flip flop how we supplement our knowledge. Where we used to create space to log-on to enhance our learning and social networks, now we need to create the space to log-off to do the same. Both have value, it's balancing that lean to stay healthy.

MY corporate take-aways:

• From a communication perspective, we need to acknowledge that our brains process information differently today than they did 5 years ago. If we intend to be helpful, we should evaluate our deliverables (print and online) to figure out if we're presenting too much information to be absorbed.
• We just completed an information audit of our weekly bulletin, enews and web site architecture. In the process, we found paragraphs and pages of content we've added over time that people aren't noticing. And, if they're not noticing them, they're not using them. Bloated content doesn't make a powerful impact. We're making adjustments. We're making cuts. We're killing and/or combining pages. We're changing our menu options. It's the responsible thing to do. And,it's not because people are dumb, it's because they're bombarded with too much information.

Comments

[Mike]

Kem,

Great article. We do need to be aware of what is happening in our society, both culturally & even physically & mentally. It all plays a big part in effective communication. BTW I had a hard time reading through the article without metal wandering. A little lengthly. LOL

Love your insights!

[Clayton Bell]

AWESOME post! I love when we get these thoughts from you. Always great to hear what the best in the biz is thinking!

[Matt Singley]

"Bloated content doesn't make a powerful impact". Amen, sister! Sadly only a small percentage of churches have figured this out. The others are stuffing more and more info into their comm pieces hoping to slow down the exodus out the back door. Totally wrong approach.

Thanks for putting these thoughts into nice, neat bullet points so I could absorb them!

[Michelle Wegner]

Great post! I couldn't get to the end though...too long. Haha
Really though, I find myself spending WAY less time watching mind-numbing television than 5 years ago now that I'm online more. I spend that time in way smarter ways, like investing time into relationships via reading friends' blogs, journaling my thoughts and what I'm learning...Studying things I would never normally study, etc.
You're right. The new way of thinking "internetly" is not bad, just a different way of doing things.